Cope, Adapt, Thrive: Ensuring Our Shared Future on a Hot and Hostile Planet
On Thursday, October 24, 2024, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna delivered the Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture in Tsai Auditorium in Cambridge. Weatherhead Center Director Melani Cammett moderated the conversation. McKenna, a member of the Weatherhead Center Advisory Committee, is Chief Executive Officer of Mercy Corps, where she leads a team of 6,000+ humanitarians who provide immediate relief and help communities forge new paths to prosperity in the face of disaster, conflict, poverty, and climate change. Below is an excerpt of McKenna’s talk, edited for clarity and length. Watch the entire lecture on our YouTube channel.
Good evening, everyone. It truly is my pleasure to do this today and to be back here. This opportunity is especially meaningful for me. I truly never would have imagined that I'd be doing this more than twenty-five years ago when I was living in my freshman dorm—not very far away from here.
What I want to share with you today is a message of urgency and optimism—the urgency of ensuring that amid these siren voices of isolation, we continue to focus on our shared future as a global community and a community of human beings, that we take urgent action together as a result.
I also want to share with you today an optimism that we can make progress happen even in the face of the climate crisis and increasing conflict. The numbers are overwhelming and can feel hopeless. But as a practitioner, I get to see the change in real people's lives.
So the optimism that I hope to share today is not an empty hope, but the result of seeing firsthand the real and tangible impact that my team at Mercy Corps and organizations like ours are helping to deliver every day on the frontlines of climate change and conflict in more than forty countries around the world.
So let me begin with the urgency of the moment we find ourselves in today, on the cusp of the second quarter of the twenty-first century. Looking back over my 15–20 years in this space, I am struck by how different this moment feels in comparison with when I was completing my own studies here more than a quarter century ago.
Then, coming up into 2000, amid a global wave of increased trade, aid, and debt relief, we were beginning to witness incredible progress in what had previously been viewed as intractable challenges. The global mobilization behind the Millennium Development Goals, agreed in 2000 and concluded in 2015, helped to deliver arguably the greatest global progress for the greatest number of people ever in human history.
More than a billion people emerged from extreme poverty. The number of children without access to primary school worldwide fell by almost half. In just a few years, countries across Africa made improvements in infant, child, and maternal survival rates that had taken decades to achieve in Europe. Access to intra-antiretroviral treatment saved millions of lives that would otherwise have been lost.
The progress was not inevitable. It was hard-won and there were setbacks. In 2008, a global crisis driven by the surging prices of wheat, rice, and other cereals triggered panic, instability, and hunger around the world. I joined the Obama administration to launch a global hunger initiative aimed at tackling that crisis.
By the time I had left the administration in 2015, we had, together with partners across the world, made such progress in addressing hunger that as we developed the successor to the Millennium Development Goals—the Sustainable Development Goals—we collectively set our sights on this audacious goal of ending extreme hunger by the year 2030. And we really thought that was possible. So in just seven years, from 2008 to 2015, we were able to go from the depths of crisis to the heights of ambition.
Yet today we face a global inflection point. The achievements of recent decades are in grave jeopardy, both because of the shocks of COVID, climate change, and conflict, and because of the unraveling of the global solidarity that led to the incredible rise in living standards that we saw at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one.
The COVID pandemic was a truly global emergency that led to the deaths of nearly sixteen million people worldwide and disrupted economic, social, and family life on every continent. COVID was a global problem. But as we all know too well, not everyone suffered equally. We saw this in our communities. We saw this in our country, that those who had been the most marginalized amongst us suffered the most in COVID. And we saw that play out on a global scale as countries hoarded vaccines and testing.
For those who were on the brink of poverty, the pandemic had the additional impact of rolling back years of progress. Extreme poverty increased in 2030 for the first time in decades. Today, more than 300 million people around the world face acute hunger—almost 200 million more than before the pandemic.
As we began to emerge from the shadow of COVID, the twin threats of climate change and conflict are now increasingly the pressure that's put on the world's most vulnerable people, those who live in fragile states. Fragility is defined by the combination of exposure to risk and a lack of a coping capacity to manage, absorb, or mitigate those risks. Fragile states are home to a quarter of the world's population, some 1.9 billion people. But as many as three-fourths of people living in extreme poverty live in these fragile states.
When I started my career in this space, ending extreme poverty—the magic bullet, if there was one—was seen as helping smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and India increase their incomes. That was too simplistic.
Fragile states are where it has been hardest to make and maintain progress in tackling poverty. And we've got to be looking at fragile states if we want to end extreme poverty. And climate change and conflict are making those challenges to progress even greater still.
Each month since June 2023 has ranked as the planet's hottest on record. Climate change is a lived reality for us all. We see it here in the US with annual raging fires and heat waves that have left no state untouched, more intense hurricanes and flooding, as we've seen recently with the devastation in North Carolina and Florida. But the climate crisis has the most severe impact on vulnerable communities in the countries that not only have contributed the least to the problem, but also have the fewest resources to cope with climate change or adapt to a hotter world.
At the same time, we have seen a global resurgence of conflict even beyond the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that dominate our newsfeeds. Last year saw the highest number of state-based conflicts since 1946, and these wars are increasingly being waged with too little care for the protection of civilians. In fact, the past three years were the most violent and deadly for civilians since before the turn of the century.
Conflict and climate change each cause devastation, but they are increasingly converging to create ever-escalating challenges for vulnerable communities. Climate change and conflict go hand-in-hand, and they escalate one another. Climate change increases competition for resources. It strains social safety nets. It gives people more opportunities to be disappointed in those charged with saving them and being there for them in times of emergencies.
It isn't by chance that the world's most worrisome hotspots are also mired in conflict alongside the devastating impacts of climate change. The compounding effects of climate change and conflict have created an epic crisis of displacement. One hundred and twenty million people have been forced to flee their homes worldwide, and as many as 339 million people around the world rely on humanitarian assistance to survive—more than twice as many as five years ago.
Every year for the past decade, we've been able to say, sadly, this is the worst number of disasters, the worst number of displaced people. It just increases. So the urgency of this moment could not be greater. Yet, just as the need for international cooperation and commitment is greater than it has been in any time in this century, we are, instead, seeing a global retreat into nationalism and populism.
This year we'll see more people go to the polls than at any year in history—almost half of the world's population. Around the world, from Indonesia to Europe, from South Africa to the United States, voters are saying that they are most concerned about their cost of living and affordability.
In the West, parties that offer anti-immigrant and nationalist policies in response are surging in popularity, even while economists in those same countries argue that aging demographics mean that a decline in immigration will actually increase the economic challenges facing those same countries.
In Japan, decades of popular and political objection to immigration have shown the impact of those trends. With birth rates at a record low, and almost one third of citizens over the age of 65, Japan is struggling to meet the cost of a struggling working age population.
At the same time, we are seeing retrenchment across countries from the international cooperation and collaboration that yielded such progress in the past twenty-five years. As politicians and publics turn inwards, leaders and governments have slashed funding for foreign aid and assistance development.
UK aid is predicted to shrink to not 0.36 percent of its gross national income, which is the lowest proportion it has seen since 2007. Even worse than that, a substantial portion of UK aid is actually being used to fund hosting refugees in [other] countries—so diverting from the citizens that it was designed to protect. France's draft budget is shrinking from six billion dollars to five billion euros, which is a 12.5 percent decrease. And Germany also is looking at slashing one billion euros from its aid budget.
People have increasingly withdrawn from international trade, aid, and debt relief agreements. Yet, this withdrawal is just as shortsighted as anti-immigration rhetoric. Cooperation has been the greatest engine of economic growth and advancement for all countries, not just the world's poorest. And as the COVID pandemic showed us all, today's greatest challenges do not respect borders.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, our team was out within that same week about what the invasion of Ukraine would mean for food prices in Lebanon. Many countries across Africa and the Middle East worried about the food price crisis as a breadbasket became a war zone.
Right now, we are working to help civilians in Sudan fighting the war. And where we are in the Sahel in Niger, we are running across Russia's the Wagner Group—which has renamed itself Africa Corps, to our great chagrin. We're looking at Iranian and Russian missiles dealing with disinformation from other countries.
These things do not respect borders, and great power competition is playing out all over the world, in these myriad of conflicts.
Our hotter and more hostile world requires a bold new agenda for a shared humanity. Neither conflict nor climate change can be ignored or addressed by individual nations acting alone and in self-interest. Addressing conflict and climate change requires not a retreat from global collaboration, but a recognition that in a world so interconnected, our futures are bound together with people we have never met—human beings with their own stories, human beings that are increasingly sharing their stories across social media. There are no mysteries around what is happening.
I went to Poland about two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. And I saw a scenario there that I wish for every displaced person or refugee in the world. In the early stages, you see mostly middle-class people streaming out with their pets and with all their belongings. There were tents set up with food. There were even pet tents set up alongside tents with strollers. There were welcome centers set up.
And as I walked into one, it was like a bazaar. It was like there were booths from each country. So the Netherlands—free housing for six weeks; France—there's all kinds of—every country was making their pitch to these refugees coming in from Ukraine to come to their country and organize transportation for them...
We have to recognize that our world is so interconnected, our futures are bound together with people we have never met who look different from us, who are on the other side of the world. Because in a world of pandemics, climate crisis, and conflict, there is no us and them. There is only us.
Watch the full Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture, “Cope, Adapt, Thrive: Ensuring Our Shared Future on a Hot and Hostile Planet” on YouTube:
