Multispecies justice, loss and damage (Climate justice and loss and damage in the Pacific conference)

[Music] The very possibility of human justice and human functioning and flourishing is completely dependent on good ecological relationships. [Music] In non-economic losses we include the environment. They are almost never casted, post-disaster before or post-disaster. [Music] You're listening to the S.E.I. podcast series brought to you by the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to our first session of the day entitled Multispaces Justice, Loss and Damage. My name is Scott Webster, I'm from the Sydney Environment Institute and it is my absolute pleasure to chair this panel today, which brings multispaces justice into conversation with loss and damage. So as I mentioned this session is on multispaces justice, what it means, what is necessary and how it can be practically implemented. As a framework for justice it moves beyond a default of human priorities first to better respond to the needs of the wider more than human world. However, while the term multispaces justice may be unfamiliar for some, its underlying principles are far from new for many people. That humans are not separate from or above nature, that we are situated within ecological relationships, and that these bring responsibility and kinship beyond human ties is not a revelation. Certainly not for the generations of Aboriginal peoples on this continent caring for country, 60,000 years worth, at least, and counting. This must always be acknowledged. But multispaces justice is not about appropriating indigenous ways of being and dressing it up as a Western innovation. Multispaces and more than human are meaningful precisely because they have emerged as terms within knowledge, traditions, and systems that invest the categories of human and species with hierarchies. Western and non-indigenous thought needs to find its own vocabularies for this, achieved through grappling with its human-centric origins, and by extension uneven culpability in driving climate, ecological, and humanitarian crises. With that all said, I will now introduce our speakers. Danielle Selamaya is a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney and is Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. Danny is also Director of the Multispaces Justice Project, and along with her multispaces community survived and lived through the 2019 20 bushfire crisis in New South Wales. She has written in the face of that experience as the killing of everything, as on the side. In her book Summer Time, Reflections on a Vanishing Future, Danny asks us to really look around and to become present to all beings who are living and dying together for the loss of our shared home. She's also lead author of Institutionalising Multispaces Justice, which was recently published two weeks ago, believe, by Cambridge University Press. Ed Cousins is an associate professor and lecturer in Environmental and International Law at the University of Sydney Law School. His main research interests are biodiversity protection of both marine and terrestrial environments, as well as the complex management of alien invasive species and governance of migratory species. His work also examines the practicalities of integrating international environmental conventions within the legal frameworks of individual nations, bridging global ideals with local impact. And finally Rosemary Lester is the co lead of the Climate Disaster and Adaptation Research thing at the Sydney Environment Institute. She is a professor of Climate and Environmental Law at the University of Sydney Law School and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. In 2024, Rosemary was appointed, a member of the special rapporteurs on the right to development's academic circle. Her publications include Climate Disaster Law, co-edited with Robert Vichig, and Climate Justice and Disaster Law, published with Cambridge University Press. Please be aware that this session is being recorded and will be released as a podcast. So if you feel uncomfortable with being captured on that recording, please speak to one of our staff. Beginning with Danny, each of our presentations will be about 12 minutes long. I will then put, no, we're scrapping that. We'll then open to General Q&A from the audience. Please welcome Danny. Good morning friends and colleagues, such an honour to be speaking at this seminar and with you all today. So when the special rapporteur released his climate change loss and damage report, he not only placed justice at the centre of the approach that he laid out. But he insisted that in this era of climate change, ecologically called collapse and massive inequalities, the understanding of justice had to be a multi-species one. And so in the few minutes that I have with you today, what I wanted to do was lay out what we, at the multi-species justice collective, see as the fundamental principles of multi-species justice. And then I'm going to end with 11 questions that I think we can ask Laura and policy to see the degree to which it respects and protects multi-species justice. So I'm going to briefly speak about three foundational principles. The first one which Scott referred to is that multi-species justice starts with the view that relationships are not individuals or primary, both in terms of existence and in terms of ethics. Second, multi-species justice respects, or MSJ as I'll call it, rejects the principle which underlies pretty much all contemporary Western theories of justice that individual humans are the only subject of justice. And third, multi-species justice understands that the logics that underpin systematic injustices amongst human beings are the same logics that underpin systematic injustices against and violence to all. So I'm going to say a few words about each. First, multi-species justice is an ecological capability approach that starts with the relationships that enable functioning and flourishing. Now, this insistence on the primary of relationships is not some academic high-flying esoteric arbitrary decision. It flows directly from what indigenous peoples have known since time immemorial and what Western knowledge systems are belatedly acknowledging. And that is that the idea of the individual, the abstracted individual is both a myth and a dangerous myth. Domino-Western conceptions of justice have tended to assume that human individuals become subjects of justice or moral subjects when we leave the state of nature, or when we separate from our animal selves as opposed to understanding that we are always embedded in those ecological relationships. As the recent pandemic and the intensifying ecological disasters are making absolutely apparent, the very possibility of human justice and human functioning and flourishing is completely dependent on good ecological relationships, on water flows, on healthy soil, on biodiversity, and on healthy ecological relationships. So MSJ starts by asking, how do we best promote and protect just and healthy ecological relationships? That doesn't mean that it's unconcerned with the impacts of different arrangements on individuals. What it means is that individuals, individual humans, humans as the species, and all other individuals are always understood as functionally embedded in the relationships that are they enable or disable our functioning and flourishing. Second, multi-species justice, as I said, rejects the premise of pretty much all contemporary Western theories of justice. And that is that individual humans, humans understood as in a particular way associated with the Western Enlightenment, are the sole subjects of justice. And, correlatively, the other side of that, that the value of all Earth's others is at best inferior or more usually entirely in the service of human good. With extremely rare exceptions, no Western law at any level, local, national or international, provides the type of protections to the fundamental interest of Earth's others, that we assume law ought to provide to humans or individual humans, some humans. Mainstream environmental law may require that the impacts on certain development, for example, on Earth's others, should under certain circumstances be considered when deciding on a particular course of action and similarly animal welfare law may require that certain practices like how we kill or keep domesticated animals are modified to curb particular type of excesses. But those considerations and modifications are always subordinated to particular human and in particular economic interests. This is not a case as in human rights of competing or conflicting human rights that need to be balanced against each other. This is a hierarchical organisation in which the fundamental interests of earth others are always defeatsable and always subordinated to often trivial and particular economic and human interests. For multi species justice the functioning and flourishing of earth others is like the functioning and flourishing of humans a matter of justice. Now I'm just going to take a little aside I suspect that the question that you're going to be asking yourself and implicitly may is well who or what do you mean when you talk about earth others surely we're not talking about everybody or everything is they usually referred to. Now the multi species justice collective has taken a pretty strong position on that and that is that yes actually everybody counts all earth beings who are affected by the decisions that human beings make about how we're going to organise ourselves and organise life have a right to be considered in those decisions. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be conflicts that have to be negotiated it means that there's not an a priori exclusion of certain earth beings and I'm just going to name three reasons why we've taken that position because I think they're really critical to understanding the approach of multi species justice. The first which I articulated as the first principle is that if we're going to seriously attend to the functioning and flourishing of any living being we can't do that abstracted from the ecological flows within which they're embedded. Second for many indigenous peoples as my colleague Christine Winter has reminded us from the beginning the world is not organised according to the same categories that are taken for granted in Western knowledge systems and third the hierarchies that tend to be assumed take the human individual and the type of capacities that humans have as the template against which we measure how the beings and for multi species justice we need to take beings in their own terms and what functioning and flourishing means for them not compare them to the ideal subject of justice being the human being. That doesn't mean that everybody is rendered equivalent it doesn't mean that there are no distinctions but those aren't a priori set into a hierarchy from the beginning. Now one objection and I think this is really critical to our conversations today that is often raised when we speak about multi species justice is that there is something obscene or immoral about attending to the to the wellbeing of earth others when so many human beings are subject to such violence and injustice and suffering and that points to the third and final principle that I wanted to articulate. That MSJ contends that the systems and logics that render some groups of human systematically vulnerable to injustice and violence are the same systems and logics that undergird systematic violence and injustice against earth others. So a series and if we you know this is not a multi species justice this comes from eco feminism critical race theory critical indignant theory that the series of hierarchies between mind and body, between spirit and earth, between male and female, organized systems like capitalism and colonialism in a way that systematically value some and devalue others. And so anyone who says that addressing multi species justice is undermining our attention to injustice against human beings is fundamentally misunderstanding the logics that are driving all those forms of violence. So that's in a nutshell a theory that we've written several books that many papers about and we're hopefully have the opportunity to speak about how that plays out more. I'm now just going to lay out 11 questions that that we have identified as useful for thinking about how we would evaluate law and policy. Does the law or policy require that the interests of all up of earth others be taken into account in its domain of concern and if so which ones and how are they selected? Second how are earth others represented or included in decision making? Three how are they interests assessed which knowledges are involved and who is involved? Four how are the impacts on earth others assessed and again which knowledges are used and who is involved? Five are the impacts of different environmental flows and cycles taken into account. A relational impacts taken into account for example do we consider the impacts on forests and how they flow on to animals or soil? Six how are the impacts of different beings human and other than human weighted and how a conflict assessed? Seven in considering all of the above how do we think about the temporal and spatial rate so are we looking downstream in terms of temporal impacts and also across systems? Does the policy require that the relationships between people in the affected areas and the earth or those in those areas are taken into account? A people affected directly affected directly empowered in decision making and a different groups of the different power relationships taken into account? Nine how does the law or policy ensure that powerful actors can be held accountable to the human and more than human communities and relationships whose functioning and flourishing they impact? And finally how do the laws and policy support contestation with respect to all of the questions of inclusion, value and representation of human and more than human communities that I've outlined? Thank you. Morning people my name is Ed Cousins I'm talking about recognizing environmental legal rights in the South Pacific. Internationally there has been a great deal of movement in recent years in respect of according legal rights to nature inherent legal rights. Been numerous efforts made in the United States and the Philippines for example to give catations inherent legal rights and the right of Habayah's corpus or to be released from prison which is a right normally accorded only to human beings has been suggested as a right that might be used to obtain the release from zoos and other facilities of certain animal species and although that has not those efforts have not yet come to anything in the United States we did see a case in Argentina where an orangutan was successfully released using the root of Habayah's corpus. In Latin America there have been significant legal moves Ecuador has used its constitution to entrench legal rights for nature. Bolivia has passed a statute and Colombia has seen its constitutional court given nature legal rights to particular rivers so you've had three different legal approaches adopted in Latin America. New Zealand has accorded legal rights to a mountain, a river and a forest acting through a parliamentary act but through recognition of a treaty settlement. In India at one point although it was not in the end event you ate the high court gave a river legal rights based on religious principles. In Australia there have not been formal legal developments, part from one that I'll come to the next slide but there is a project pushing for nature to be accorded legal rights and lightly working through relationships within indigenous persons and it has been suggested that the Margaret River, the Blue Mountains and the Great Barrier Reef, all be accorded inherently legal rights. One formal legal step that has been taken in Australia is quasi legal recognition of the Yarra River running through Melbourne which has been recognized as a living integrated natural entity for purposes of protection and that has involved recognition of Aberdeen. responsibility. How much we can really expect from Australia in terms of formal legal recognition at a time when persons do not have that in the Australian constitution is open to debate. In Bangladesh, on the basis of the damage that has been done, the amount of encroachment on rivers and the pollution of rivers, the Supreme Court has recognised that rivers have legal rights. In Canada, First Nations groups have recognised that a particular river has legal rights. Some other jurisdictions have what I've called creeping jurisdiction. In other words, legal rights are being accorded without being formally labelled as such. In South Africa, for example, on a scientific basis, the environment has been given legal rights to maintain its hydrological cycle with that priority right being given the same status as is given to human beings. What I think is most interesting about all of these and comparing all of them is not just that the proposals have been made, but that they are all being made and in many cases achieved at roughly the same time on very different basis. Constitution, statutes, court judgments, religions, threats to the environment, treaties with indigenous persons. And that I think says that this is an idea whose time has come that so many different jurisdictions are finding different ways to justify giving nature legal rights. If there's a thread that runs through all of these, it's probably the link between nature and indigenous persons. And the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Persons makes it clear that we are to recognise inherent linkage between indigenous rights and protections of nature. In the South Pacific, nature, generally, by diversity in particular, face numerous threats. I've listed only a few of the major ones. We can see major threats at the high level, the macro level climate change broadly. We can all weigh down to garbage disposal. This is how rubbish contributed by tourists in the Cook Islands is dealt with by being burnt. In the South Pacific, we have three broad regions, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. Just leave that slide for a moment. Just get a sense of where the different states are located. Numerous legal issues arise. One of the obvious starting points, if we were to say, well, how would we introduce or how would we entrench, how would we recognise legal rights to nature in the South Pacific? That's only points would be to look at the constitution of each state. But as I'm going to show you quickly on the next three slides, there's very little to be found in the constitution. There are numerous conflicts. We can't look at the South Pacific as speaking with just one view, one voice. In very recent years, one of the three regions, Micronesia, came to the very precipice of leaving the main coordinating body, the Pacific Islands for it. We also need to look at the conflicts, the differences in interests between developed states and developing states in the South Pacific, particularly France, the United States and the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. We look also at the role of developed states, which don't have ownership, but which have strong interests, the interests of China especially. And when you travel in the South Pacific and you get out of the major cities and into smaller towns, you realise that China's influence is absolutely embedded in a way that Australia simply cannot compete with. China has interests in construction, ownership of businesses, trading that Australia simply does not have. Looking at the different constitutions, there is in fact only one state in the South Pacific that has a constitution which has a dedicated and sophisticated environmental rights and that's Fiji. If you understand that Fiji based its constitution heavily on the South African constitution, you would understand why that is the case. The vast majority of the South Pacific states have almost nothing in their constitutions. New Caledonia, French Polynesia, as their constitutions are, France's constitution have environmental rights, but as unique territories in and of themselves, they don't have very significant constitutional rights. But there are initiatives being taken in 2018, a group of academics, researchers and representatives of indigenous persons met in New Zealand and initiated a process toward creating a regional convention for the rights of the Pacific Ocean and adopted a statement of principles which would see the Pacific Ocean recognises a living entity with rights to exist, thrive and evolve and recognises also strong linkage with the cultural traditions of people in the Pacific. The Pacific Islands Forum, representative of those three broad regions, has adopted a strategy to take us up to the year 2050, for the blue Pacific Islands, essentially to protect the oceans. But curiously, in its thematic areas, there's not a great deal of recognition of cultural heritage. Very recent initiative, Pacific Indigenous leaders in the middle of last year adopted a declaration on the ocean, which accorded Wales legal status. Rather, unfortunately, I've been battling to find an original copy of this text, I've only managed to read around it, I haven't managed to get hold of the original text, I'm still looking for that. In December I visited this, Tapitapitaya, the heart of Polynesian culture, one of only nine world heritage sites in South Pacific, and that's quite a staggering figure. You consider that there are more than 1200 world heritage sites worldwide. The fact that there are only nine in the South Pacific tells us how undeserved the South Pacific has been in terms of cultural recognition. But this is an important site. As a world heritage site, what it recognises and what that figure represents, is the giant Polynesian octopus who recognizes the migratory and navigation routes, connecting all of the different nations and lands within the Polynesian part of the South Pacific. And what I'll conclude with, this is my last slide, so I'll take it back to my illustration on the very first slide. This is an eel I met in December on the island of Quahina in the French Polynesia, and I think the idea that this eel is actually referred to as a sacred eel, and is at the same time a threatened species, very few of them, with very little of early understood migratory patterns between fresh water and the marine environment. According to this creature. culture, cultural recognition as being sacred to the indigenous persons and at the same time recognizing the value of protecting biodiversity is important. And this ultimately I think is how we would best protect biodiversity in the South Pacific by fostering and promoting linkages with human culture. Thanks very much to Danny and Ed. I want to begin with a quote from one of our colleagues at the Sydney Environment Institute from one of her articles in Environmental Politics where she recognized that 40 people tragically died in the smoke haze, in other words not directly in the fires but from breathing in the smoke, but so did around 3 billion animals, rasp, gas and dye in the unbreedable air and the cinder heavy rivers. And she goes on to say a multi-species justice approach brings moral consideration to the non-humans such as the trees shrubs wildfire flowers, fungi, frogs, wombatts and wallabies who suffocated or were indeed incinerated and who became the smoke. Humans and non-humans breathed in, choked on and coughed up my new particles of our multi-species world. And I think that just is obviously a horrifying and disturbing image but a very real reflection of what was going on. And all the time it was the humans that were profiled, the media focused on humans and there was very little said at any stage about the impacts on the more than human world. So there has been inadequate recognition as Danny was saying but including in the international texts and I want to draw our attention and I'm sorry if this section does seem a bit wordy but I want to draw our attention to the fact that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the starting point for us because it acknowledges that we need to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change. Now unfortunately that's really one of the last definitive statements about ecosystems because the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage which of course was designed for people living in least developed countries on loss and damage makes no mention of ecosystems. The Paris Agreement speaking about the Warsaw International Mechanism says in article 84, "Accordingly areas of cooperation and facilitation to enhance understanding may include the resilience of communities, livelihoods and ecosystems. And in all of the reports of the Warsaw International Mechanism two cups I read all of the decisions that come out of cups and all of the reports that go into cups there is no mention of ecosystems whatsoever." So what we can see is that there has been a disappearing of the more than human at the international level. Now the adaptation gap report of 2023 says that there's barely any mention of non-economic loss and damage at all, let alone ecosystems in any of the national adaptation plans developed under the Paris Agreement. I undertook last year a personal literature review of over 295 journal articles on loss and damage all of which failed to mention ecosystems. Karen McNamara and colleagues wrote an article on non-economic loss and damage in the Pacific and found that four issues were highlighted, cultural heritage and knowledge because of the displacement of humans, the life and health of humans, ecosystem services but only in relation to how they support human resilience and also the question of the sense of place and social cohesion for humans. And so that is why I have specifically attempted to develop a multi-species justice approach to the question of loss and damage and Danny has already spoken about why multi-species deserve our attention. And so lawyers have long been grappling with this problem that environmental and climate laws are so deficient in terms of dealing with the real issues. And of course we acknowledge that there has been a complete failure of international and domestic institutions who are charged with taking responsibility for preventing the climate and biodiversity crises. Ed has already mentioned the Colombian court's River Charter decision, I think he did add yes, where the courts said traditional remedies are not going to surprise. It requires complex measures and an inter-institutional articulation. Another academic David Tachek said we need a radical to the roots re-jigging of our legal system towards sanity. And Kotsa and others have said that this calls for a complete re-imagination of our law. Now just to take Danny's discussion a bit further in terms of the legal system, I think it's very well known that the Anglo-American legal and political thought assigns great value to the autonomy of humans and to our moral and our legal rights. And the community or the collective, in other words the environment, right? Or the state poses a constant threat to human autonomy. So the function of law, including constitutional rights in fact, is often a way of bounding off a sphere of individual autonomy into which nobody, even the state shouldn't true. And as Jenny Nadalsky says, this is a powerful picture and enduring picture, but it's also a distorted picture. And so I want to just take us to a recent book written by an evolutionary biologist at Reading University Tom Oliver. And he talks about the impossibility of the human autonomous agent. And he says most of the 37 trillion cells in our bodies have a lifespan of days to weeks. New molecules continually flow through us derived from atoms from the furthest reaches of the universe, which have made up the bodies of countless other plants and animals before us. Most of the cells in our body are not even human. As we contain more bacterial than human cells, some of these influence our moods and manipulate our behavior, detracting from our supposed autonomy. So Jennifer Nadalsky in talking about the problems with the Western legal system encourages us to exceed, transform and create something new. And the something new is a relational approach to law, which focuses our attention on the way that law structures relations and affects core values and who can enjoy them. And she says I see a link between the disembodied subject and one of the most fundamental and neglected relationships that have human beings to earth and to the other beings who inhabit it with us. In an optimal relational approach, our place and the ecology of earth would be recognized as a relationship that shapes and is shaped by all others. And so what I have attempted is a rewriting of the international climate legal materials. And obviously I can't go through all of that work, but I'm just going to give you some indications. So with regard to the Warsaw International Mechanism, which I've indicated to you, mentions only humans, I've written this, that the intention is to develop approaches to address loss and damage associated with climate change impacts on humans. In developing countries and more than human beings all around the world, that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change to enhance the adaptive capacity. Also, the mechanism takes note of the relevant knowledge and ongoing work and I've added relating to human and more than human beings living in entangled relationships outside of the convention. So they're telling themselves to take note of the IPCC reports, but I've added the reports of the intergovernmental science policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystems. It also notes that a range of approaches is available to assess the risk of and to respond to loss and damage and involves the engagement of all relevant stakeholders to which I add including representatives of the more than human beings. Now paragraph five also agrees that the role of the convention in promoting the implementation of approaches to address loss and damage includes involving vulnerable communities and populations and I've added of all human and more human beings as well as civil society, the private sector and other relevant stakeholders and I've added including establishing processes to ensure that the interests of other of beings other than humans are recognised in the assessment of loss and damage and then the Paris Agreement came after the Warsaw mechanism. So this comes from the preamble to the Paris Agreement just a few of the paragraphs there also recognising the specific needs and special circumstances of particularly vulnerable developing country parties and again and more than human beings around the world to the effects of climate change. Acknowledging that climate change is a common concern of all human and more than human beings living in entangled relationships because before just said humankind so I have struck that out. Parties should when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations and it read to towards human rights and I've added towards the rights of more than human beings and these are their capabilities to exist, evolve, adapt, regenerate, recover and be preserved as well as of course human rights, the rights of Indigenous people, local communities and intergenerational equity and then noting the importance of ensuring the integrity of all more than human beings including ecosystems and the protection of biodiversity. The Paris Agreement preamble states recognise by some cultures as Mother Earth. So I have rewritten and noting the importance of the concept of Mother Earth, multi-species climate justice, not just climate justice and biocultural rights when taking action to address climate change. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for three wonderful papers. Does anyone have any questions they wish to pose to any or the group? I've noticed today a sort of tension between discourse on rights and discourse on justice and I wonder whether talking about rights influences things in certain ways and talking about justice influences our appreciation in other ways. I would say that justice is a more capacious and multi-dimensional concept and practice than rights. Rights is a particular form of institutionalising justice and I'm going to take your question really to bridge to a larger question about strategy that I think those of us who recognise the degree to which dominant law and policy takes the form of a certain way of being a human as it's ideal and systematically disadvantages groups of other humans and Earth others that are very thorough going transformation is needed all the way down. But we're not going to get there tomorrow and so strategically I think there are questions about what are the strengths and weaknesses of using rights based approaches. You can build a bridge from a rights based approach because it's something that people recognised it's already encoded in law and policy but the constraint is that that can then reinforce those particularly problematic and anthropomorphic morphologies. So if there are big you know and I'll pass to Ed and Rosemary in a moment but there are big debates for example around the rights of nature. Now my personal view is that when other subjects become the subjects of rights they also and this goes back to I think to the special rapporteur's address about the beyond that one of the beyond is beyond victimhood and other subjects are not just victims of the language of rights when they become the subjects of rights they can transform them. And so if you look at the jurisprudence in Ecuador around the rights of rivers you start to get a very different conception of what rights mean. Yeah I'm just going to answer that very generically in the sense that when law students come to Sydney Law School in one of their first tutorials they ask why have they come to do law and they say because they want to achieve justice and of course that's a big question isn't it because that's what we've been saying. That laws that are written don't necessarily achieve justice but one of the ways in which the law articulates justice is through the language of at the moment human rights and increasingly rights for nature. I have this I'll just say yes we do our best very quickly to knock out of our first year law students the idea that law has anything to do with justice but what was this yeah I'll answer in a much more specific way and I'll keep answered to the South Pacific and I say that in all of the constitutions that I've been looking at with the one exception of Fiji's which is somewhat different to the others they're very concentrated on due process rights and on issues like you know what a person's rights are when arrested or what the rights to legal representation they have so they're heavy on this procedural side and that really is what we tend to think of with we talk of justice so what we've got to get away from is this concentration on justice as the human-centric procedural aspect and broaden it to recognise a much greater set of rights here. Thank you everyone it's Catherine Baker from the Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility here in Sydney. I am fascinated by this discussion. I am really interested in the way that we frame our thinking and putting a dollar value on all of this in terms of loss and damage and how we cost being in my line of work cost benefit analysis is key to convincing investors as to why they should invest in resilient infrastructure for climate and disaster resilience more broadly but trying to put a dollar value on the cost or benefits not just to humans which is traditionally how it's been done but to multi-species is a whole line of work which is evolving I think but I'm just very interested to know if there's been any research with the economic sphere we've worked with the humanitarian engineering hub here and did a session last year with that group and yeah we are very interested in how we frame the discourse on proving the benefit of investing in our climate and resilient infrastructure and any feedback on costings from your perspective on how we put multi-species into the mix. Okay thank you I can answer that one what I first want to say is that when we think about costing for loss and damage at all we start with economic costs and largely those costs to infrastructure costs because it's easier for governments to say we've lost this number of bridges we've lost infrastructure and so very often the costs are formulations are generated from those sorts of losses none non-economic losses are almost never and in non-economic losses. we include the environment. They are almost never costed, post-disaster before, or post-disaster. And in fact, work has been done by the Australian Business Council on Disaster Risk Reduction, which some of you might know, who released a report saying that, in fact, their research showed that the non-economic losses from disasters are way in excess of the economic losses. So, in fact, we need to think generally about how to cost all of the issues that we've spoken about this morning, the cultural losses and so on. Now, when we get to talking about putting a dollar value on biodiversity, let's call it, of course, there are moves that have been afoot around the world, including under international agreements, but in Australia here as well, and precisely to put a dollar value on species. The reason that that is being done is to trade them. And we would categorically reject any notion that it is morally or ethically feasible to engage in biodiversity trading so that you can destroy one habitat while saving another, which often is very far away from the habitat destroyed, and where there is no likeful like trade at all. In other words, there should not be a trade, and I'm sure you can find people who would be prepared to tell you what the dollar value is. I know that the way it's calculated in New South Wales is that they take a habitat hectare, and they imagine that they know what is within that habitat hectare, and then they put a dollar value on it in terms of a trade. So you've asked a really important question. Thank you so much for that question. Thanks Rosemary. I just want to make two brief addendons. One is just to gesture towards the incredibly dangerous indirect impacts of commodifying life. And I think I'm not naive to the politics of placing economic value and what that can achieve, but I think given the gravity of the crisis and the deleterious impacts of the commodification of everything, at this point we really need to be quite stalwart about being wary of the impacts. The second point I want to make is we've recently completed a large piece of research looking at how communities organised to careful, protect and rescue domesticated farms and wild animals during and after the black summer bushfires. And we found that overwhelmingly communities consider themselves multi-species communities. So this isn't some esoteric approach coming from the University of Sydney or other universities. People were prepared to place their bodies and their lives in very concrete danger because they considered their multi-species relations to be an intrinsic part of what makes their lives valuable. So I think one way into that and I'm linking to where Ed finished his presentation is to dispel ourselves of this illusion that there is a value of biodiversity and a value of human culture and to recognise that it's within those biocultural relationships that we can recognise value across all Earth beings. We have a question online. It's from John Clemone and he asks when Rosemary proposes adjusting the Warsaw mechanism wording to relevant stakeholders, including representatives of more than human beings, what does that look like in practice? Given many indigenous communities, especially in Pacific, have long connections with their environments, including more than human species, are they to be by proxy the representatives? Thank you so much, that is a really great question. And of course, representation can be legal representation, it can be political representation, they all sorts of ways in which we think about representation. So just speaking about it from a legal perspective very quickly, is that the evolution in law about who has the right to bring a matter to court has gone from only at common law only the person directly affected, usually where their property is affected, has the right to bring an action, right? And we have evolved to the point where as Ed has pointed out, courts have given the rights of, have recognised the rights of all sorts of, we might say, mountains biodiversity with others. So we've seen a tremendous evolution in that, and then when we talk about the Warsaw Mechanism, it's how do we get people, how do we get representation for others. And ultimately, at the end of the day, it's going to be representation through humans. Now that doesn't mean that it's not difficult to understand what the needs of the earth other world is, but at the end of the day, what the courts through constitutions and through, and parliament through legislative measures have done is to establish committees. So proxies, proxy representatives, where invariably a first nation's person is on that committee, maybe with government representatives and others, so that the interests of the mountain species world can be brought into negotiations, into the courts and so on, so that's how it has developed so far, but I'm very happy to pass the microphone to Danny, who will talk about a conference, right, that we have in here in June. It's such a great question, and thank you for the question. All I want to say is this is really where the cutting edge of long species justice is at the moment. So as Ed outlined, there have been a myriad developments in the judiciary with respect to recognising that intrinsic value or the rights of more than human others, but we haven't seen parallel developments in the realm of politics, but right now there are experiments and conversations going on all over the world, and critically, as the questioner alluded, ridiculous peoples have very long-standing practicals, practices, protocols and philosophies, of equating more than human others. And in June this year, we're having a five-year symposium where we have indigenous peoples from all over the world coming together with artists, political scientists, the lawyers, and anthropologists, for the first time to have a conversation about what can be learned from indigenous peoples, what are their practices, what's the thoughts they need in order to renew that, but also how can we bring this into mainstream political decision-making. So we welcome you all to be part of that. It's a question, but it's really a reflection on a range of questions that you've posed as the panel, and it dovetails really beautifully with what Danielle just said. So I want to talk about some of the really practical barriers. So we have, in the international climate change space, this kind of normative nod now to indigenous knowledge systems, particularly as relevant in a climate science discussion. However, if you want to be involved in generating some of that climate science, you basically need to be funded in a position removed from your Pacific government job in order to be able to contribute. That's impossible for a lot of Pacific countries, and we don't have another mechanism for including people in that space. They don't come from well-funded universities who think that's highly prestigious. So they're trying to manage, for example, the Bureau of Meteorology and maybe contribute on the side. And it's totally impractical. The question that you posed, Ed, about why are there not more world heritage listings? I spent years of my life on chief rheumato's domain. It took years for the dossier to be put together by archaeologists and anthropologists and cultural heritage practitioners in response to the cultural heritage that was in place. It's technical. It's, again, Western European logics that inform all of these processes. The entire Pacific worldview, and please Pacific colleagues come in, is multi-species. And yet the entire space is a space of compromise, right? So for years, the Pacific has been trying to move oceans into climate change negotiations. Fiji launched the oceans agenda with Palau. It's been years in the making when they're talking about oceans. They're not just talking about the climate implications of oceans. They're talking as oceans as spaces for all the species that they live alongside. But the logic of that has never found proper support in the climate change mechanism. So the how of those spaces in the ocean. is fractious. It's an endless space of compromise that people are working within. The Indigenous people's forum is a side event. Often there is an adequate translation for all the languages that Indigenous people speak in the international climate negotiations. So, you know, I spend my life running a program to take First Nations and Pacific Islander scholars to COP. And particularly for those First Nations scholars, the Indigenous people's forum can be very disheartening as an experience. There's also a technicality to these processes. They are procedural, they are legal, they are constructed in particular kinds of ways. They're incredibly intimidating. I've been in delegations who their major towns are smaller than the scale of people that we have at a COP. For Vanuatu, you know, Cops are now 90,000 people, you know, that's almost a third of the population of the country that's attending one of those international conferences. You have to, you know, kind of bring it together as a scale, a form, the logics, the knowledges that are privileged, the power structures that are embedded in all of these arrangements, that on all of these different scales are what makes it so incredibly difficult to accommodate the logics that would otherwise, I mean, if the Pacific was writing these things, they would look different. But the Pacific is already internalising a lot of the logics that they know are informing what they can move forward with. You can look to Vanuatu's sustainable development plan, for example, for a different ways of thinking. You can look at the Malaysia well-being strategy. You can look at the work that's been done on what well-being looks like. And you start to find different ways of articulating some of these ideas. Anyway, I'll just leave that there. Thank you. Can we please thank all of our speakers for this one for that one? Thank you.