Climate change is the most complex and urgent challenge facing the world today. Yet climate diplomacy - largely conducted through the annual COP meetings - has thus far failed to deliver.

There is a geographical disconnect between cause and effect: the nations of the Global North - historically by far the main contributor to climate change - continue to fail to meet their legally mandated targets established under the Paris Agreement, yet the Global South is disproportionately impacted, and with far fewer resources to build resilience and adaptive capacity.

Until we have a globally accepted and adhered to means of pricing-in the true cost of polluting the atmosphere with planet-heating gasses, we cannot leave it to the markets to solve.

Finally, the entrenched political order is proving dysfunctional to effectively combat climate change.

While highlighting these paradigmatic barriers, Prof. Khan will discuss some ways forward to crack the intractability of climate diplomacy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Prof. Mizan R. Khan is Technical Lead of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Universities Consortium on Climate Change, which is an official program for capacity building in the LDCs. He serves as the LDC Coordinator of Action for Climate Empowerment, an agenda under the UNFCCC, which focuses on climate education and training. Since 2009 he served as Adjunct Professor/Visiting Fellow at Brown University, University of Manitoba; University of Calcutta; Universite de Poitiers; and the University of Maryland at College Park. He is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Currently, he is contributing as the Coordinating Lead Author for writing the Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7), hosted by UNEP. Prof. Khan has been nominated as a Board Member of the Scientific Council of COP29 Presidency. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Board for drafting the 5-year plans in Bangladesh.