The same classification trees we introduced in our previous videos can have problems with even the simplest datasets. So, let me just sketch one out so you'll see what I mean. The tree constructed for this dataset is relatively large. Remember, trees can only cut a feature space vertically or horizontally. So, for a dataset like this one, the decision boundary would end up looking like a staircase. A better method for such datasets would be one that can find some arbitrary straight line to form the decision boundary. And there is such a method. It's called logistic regression. So, let me first use the logistic regression widget from the educational add-on because it can also display the decision boundaries in two dimensions. Remember to install a new add-on, just find add-ons in the options menu. Okay, my educational add-on, for example, is already installed. So, the logistic regression widget we're looking for is called polynomial classification. And don't worry about the name, we'll explain it when we get to linear regression in a couple of episodes. Okay, I'll add this widget to the output of paint data. You can see the widget plots a straight line that represents my decision boundary. Excellent. Along the decision boundary, the probability of a point belonging to either class is equal. All the other lines you can see indicate where the probability predicted by logistic regression is still constant but leaning to one side, say 0.8 over here or 0.2 over on this side. Now, notice that these probability lines in our contour plot are packed very close together. This is because the data I've drawn is clearly separated by a straight line, and the logistic regression model can be sure in predicting one class or the other when the point is just barely off the decision boundary. And I can change this by adding a few extra points to my data set. I'll arrange the paint and polynomial classification widget side by side, then draw a couple of blue points in the red area. Now, you can see how the contour lines grow further apart. And let me do this again, but this time, pay close attention to the plot. First, I'll undo the changes I just made by pressing CTRL Z. Now, the separation between the two classes is clear and the contours are packed together again. Then, again, I'll add a few extra points like before, and maybe some more red points in the blue area like this. Okay, the contours are increasingly separated, but the decision boundary, that is the line with the class probability of 0.5, stays in about the same place. So, adding more and more noise, logistic regression gets cautious, lowering the certainty of its predictions near the decision boundary. And this is great. It means logistic regression not only finds a decision boundary, but also assesses the class probabilities around it. For a data set with a clear boundary, the model will be fairly confident in its predictions, and the probabilities will be high. But the murkier the data set, the more unsure the logistic regression will be, and the predicted probabilities will also be somewhat lower. Let's now compare the classification accuracy of logistic regression to that of classification trees on the employee attrition data set that I introduced last time. Now, remember, the class variable in this data set tells us if an employee has left the company, and our classifier should predict attrition based on other information about the employees, from age, department, level of education, hourly rates, etc. Now, I'll estimate the accuracy of both methods using tenfold cross-validation.  Actually, it performs much better if we take a look at AUC. Now, I know we still need to explain what exactly AUC is, but I promise we'll get to that in a little bit. Let's also compare it to a random forest. Now, random forests are one of the most powerful classifiers, but logistic regression seems to perform better on this data set. And the truly amazing thing is logistic regression is probably the simplest classifier you can think of. It just draws a separation line between two classes. That is in two dimensions. In higher dimensional spaces, it constructs a separation hyperplane. It's a linear classifier that defines decision boundaries as a weighted sum of features. And don't worry if that sounds a little bit technical. I'll explain what this means in my next video. Also, because of the simplicity of a weighted sum, I'll show you exactly how easy it is to explain the models constructed by logistic regression.


Welcome, and thank you for joining us this evening for the Matter of Black Lives Panel, featuring Amanda Johnston, Sean Taylor, and Samson McCormick. My name is Katrina Bruton. I'm the African-American Central Librarian here at the San Francisco Public Library, and I'm excited to be moderating tonight's discussion on the use of poetry, humor, comics, and literature to facilitate discussion on the current state of Black America. I'd like to first begin the presentation by introducing our panelists. Amanda Johnston earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Poetry, Kenfolks Quarterly, Muzzle, Pluck, and the anthologies Small Batch, Full, and the Ringing Ear, Black Poets Lean South. The recipient of multiple artist enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kristina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, Johnston is a member of the Afro-Latian Poets and a Cave Canom graduate fellow. Johnston is also a Stone Coast MFA faculty member, a co-founder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding Executive Director of Torch Literary Arts. Sean Taylor has been a lecturer at San Francisco State University, where he has taught classes in hip-hop and popular culture, media studies, trans-culturalism, and digital humanities. In the cover of comic books, Taylor is one of the co-founders slash organizers of the Black Comics Arts Festival that annually takes place over the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend. A writer with two published books, including People's Instinctive Travels and the Passive Rhythm, and Big Black Penis, Misadventures in Race and Masculinity, his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Rad Dad, and the online edition of Ebony. He may find his writings on geek nerd culture at thenerdsofcolor.org, and he will also be launching a podcast media venture during the latter part of this year. Samson McCormick, our third panelist, is an award-winning stand-up comedian, writer, and social justice advocate. He has been touring the country, performing at venues that have included the legendary Howard Theater, the Comedy Store in L.A., and the San Francisco Punchline and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One of the most celebrated LGBT comics today, McCormick exhibits a down-to-earth and light-hearted sense of humor and effectively engages audiences on topics of religion, politics, race, and sexuality. So tonight's discussion will begin with our panelists each presenting a 10-15 minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A for myself before opening the floor to questions from the audience. You shot him. When he came back, he shot and he fell, stumbling past the shot, dying, shot dead. He died then, there, fixture of his hands and fingers. We know nothing. My name is Amanda Johnston.  I have a right to be angry. That video you just saw was created by the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths for Black Poets, Beak Out. I'm going to start my presentation with a poem because those are the tools that we were able to bring forth as poets and they're continuing to share and push forward the message of working against police violence in the United States and abroad. Facing us after Yusef Komenyaka.  I knew they'd use it, damn it, tear gas. I'm grown. I'm fresh. Their clouded assumption eyes me like a runaway, guilty as night chasing morning. I run this way. The street lets me go. I turn that way. I'm inside the back of a police van again, depending on my attitude to be the difference. I run down the signs, half expecting to find my own name protesting in ink. I touch the name Freddie Gray. I see the beat cop's worn eyes. Names stretch across the people's banner. But when they walk away, the names disappear from their lips. Paparazzi flash cuts across the protesters' stare. Call it riot. The ground. A body on the ground. A white cop's image hovers over us. Then his blank gaze looks through mine. I'm a broken window. He's raised his right arm, a gun in his hand. In the black smoke, a drone tracking targets. No, a crow gasping for air. Thank you. Thank you. So Black Poets Speak Out was a campaign that started, it was very personal. It started in 2014 in November, right when the non-indictment for Officer Darren Wilson came in the murder of Mike Brown. When that happened, I was sitting in my home in Austin, Texas. I was at the island in my kitchen, and I was completely devastated. Because there's no difference between Mike Brown and my daughters. There's no difference between Mike Brown's family in Ferguson and my family in Austin, Texas. And if I'm watching this boy, this 18-year-old who was graduating from high school, getting ready for college, lay in the street in his own blood for four hours in the United States of America after doing nothing, that could be my children. That could be me. So I wanted to do something. I don't like feeling helpless. I don't like feeling out of control. And maybe I am. But we can do something. I said there has to be something we can do. So as a Kave Kahnem fellow, I turned to the largest organization that I'm a part of with all of the tools at my resources, which is poetry, which is literature, which is the community that I'm a part of. And I asked the fellows and faculty, what can we do? We started to have a conversation. My sister, Mahogany Brown, called me and said, I can feel you. I can feel you through these internet posts. I can feel you needing help. What can we do? And between Mahogany Brown, myself, Jericho Brown, Sharina Rodriguez, and John Terry Gadsden, we developed an idea to post videos online. We said we could do that for several reasons. One, first to put your face and your personhood into this work, that you are taking that risk to say, I, my name, Amanda Johnston, am not going to sit here and allow this to happen without me responding, without me acting quickly in unison with people across the country. So we said we would do these videos. And within a few days, there were over 100 videos internationally posted online and shared through social media. With those videos, you also hear that opening statement. My name, and I am a black poet, or allies say, I submit this video in support and solidarity with black poets speak out, and I have a right to be angry. We unify all of the videos with that statement to show that it's not off puts, right? It's not outliers and one-offs of people doing this work, but that we are a concentrated, unified group of people who have said that we are tired of police violence in this country. We are tired of watching our loved ones slain in the street. So we did that, and then organically it started to grow. Black poets speak out then had the videos, but we needed to be in community with each other. We needed to see each other, lay hands on each other, hold each other. So we started doing live events. December 6th was the first reading in Washington, D.C., the first live black poet speak out event. Since then, we've had well over 50. We've had panels, programs, readings, poetic, protests, have all happened across the country and in the U.K., but we needed to do more. So we continued doing the work, and we decided we wanted to do a letter writing campaign that directly tied the art and activism to civic engagement. So in 2015, January 1, I dedicated myself to write a letter every single day to elected officials from my home state of Texas all the way to the White House. In 2015, I sent well over 400 letters. Now I want to be clear, that is work, but that is not marching. That is not the same as sitting as sitting. That's an email, and that's something that everybody can do. That was that easy to send. You can send mass emails. So it was really easy for me to do, but what was really telling was to see the non-response. I had emailed Ted Cruz as a senator from Texas. I emailed the White House. I emailed 150 state representatives, and I got back less than 10 replies. So being 2016, that's good information to have as a voter then going forward, right? And what does all of this have to do with poetry? Well, poetry has been around forever, and as James Baldwin said, it is of the people, right? That poetry is meant to disturb the peace. That artists are meant to disturb the peace. So when we're watching all of this unfold, it was quite natural as a poet to see the work that it needed to do in community. So let it write in campaign. And then fourth, and finally, it has grown into lesson plans. Where we now offer online lesson plans for educated... How many people are educators? Or related to... Okay, wonderful. Please come and see me afterwards. We collaborated with Mosaic Magazine. Mosaic Magazine did a free lesson plan from Black Poets Speak Out that they published in their magazine, but you can also get it online. I brought a few issues with me. Please take them back to your campus. So we wanted to make sure that education was a part of the Black Poets Speak Out campaign because we know that there are new generations that are coming forward, that there are young people who might not see everything that's happening, but they're hearing it, right? They're feeling it. It's in their community. So we wanted to give them away an opportunity to be able to talk about what they see going on in their communities. Because let's be clear, young people, young people of color, young black people are the people who are suffering the most percentage-wise from this crisis, right? So we want to make sure that we're addressing them and talking to them and letting them know they're not crazy. That we see it. That we're here and that we are unified with them. And this work is also intended to make sure that we don't forget, that we don't become numb, right? When you start seeing hashtags and you start seeing the list and you start seeing the news and other media outlets look away and turn away, it's up to us to continue to say names like Mario Woods. It's up to us to continue to say names like David Joseph. Now I'm from Texas, Austin, Texas. Have you heard of David Joseph? David Joseph was murdered February 8th, 2016 in Austin, Texas. He was 17 years old. He was naked. He was unarmed. He was shot within seconds of police arriving to a 911 call at 10.30 am on a clear Monday morning. That child needed help. And what he got from Austin police were bullets. Have you heard of Sandra Bland? Sandra Bland was moving to Texas from Illinois. She knew her rights. She knew the law. She died in a jail cell she should have never been in. Have you heard the name Larry Jackson? Larry Jackson was murdered in 2013 in Austin, Texas. He attempted to use a bank. He went to a bank in the afternoon well after it had been robbed at 8 am that morning. He came to the bank late in the afternoon. He had committed no crime but he was chased down by an Austin police detective. That detective commandeered a vehicle to chase him. Cornered him under a Shoal Creek bridge, pistol whipped him, beat him so badly that his colon ruptured and then the forensic showed he was shot execution style in the back of the neck. I share these details so that we don't forget. They want you to forget. I share these poems so that we don't forget. They want you to become numb. They want it to be business as usual. We have children. Children we are responsible for who we're trying to raise. We need them to know the truth. I'm going to speak out has videos from children as young as 10 years old like Nicholas here and our elders and seniors who are well over 80. I'm going to let Nicholas speak to you. Name is Nicholas Haujan who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have the right to be angry. I'm going to leave a poem that I wrote called We all know or at least we have known the police have protected us just not all of us. We all have to be treated equal. I believe in equality. Black or white we have to be treated the same. It seems like the cops have flipped the aggressive switch on. And they are pointing it towards black people. We're just asking the police to stop shooting these young black men. Please stop this terrifying repetition of people of color getting murdered. It's horrible to even think about police shooting and killing young people of color. Please, you have to stop murdering and start protecting. It's your job. It's all of our job. It's all of our job to stay focused and attentive, to not look away, to not become numb, to be allies for each other, to show up and witness and to remember that we have power. One of the greatest lies is to say that we are powerless. We are operating under system of laws that we created and we obey that we trust. So what happens when we start to say that we matter more than the lie? April is National Poetry Month and I'm going to close with a small writing that I shared with the Academy of American Poets that was published in this month's issue of Poetry Magazine. As we celebrate National Poetry Month, let us widen our gaze to see clearly the people and lives blurred in the margins of rhetoric. Let us ask ourselves how we are using our power and privilege in language to empower our communities, lift the voices of others and speak for those who have been silenced. Over the past year, I have watched poets and allies rally in the word to speak out against police brutality through the Black Poets Speak Out campaign. I've seen poems raised at demonstrations in the name of justice. I've watched a man attend an open mic searching for the best words to share with his son when children were killed by those sworn to protect them. He was given James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, June Jordan and more. The poets read him the words of Ross Gay, Evie Shockley, Dinez Smith and others. In this way, I have turned to my own writing searching for the best words in my life. Right, I've asked myself who and what are my poems in service to. Let our poems be in service to the people. Let each word work relentlessly to call forth the best of our humanity. Thank you. How's everybody doing? Probably makes sense to kind of talk about my growing up. I was one of those odd kids and they were like, yeah, he's odd. And never knew what it really was. I read my first book at three, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. And then I finished The Hobbit in kindergarten. And once I read that, it pretty much kind of changed the course of my life. And for two reasons. One, reading in words and language have become an obsession for me. But also the idea of fantastic worlds became something pretty significant. My mom's from Jamaica. Dad's from Puerto Rico.  My dad like seven times grew up in a pretty abusive household. And so comic books and fantasy science fiction became like the ultimate escape. And people look at comic books as like childlike things. But if you think about how difficult it is to read a comic book, you're looking at a comic book. You're looking at panels on a page. Picture here, picture there. So your mind is actually having to build a bridge between the panels. And then you're also looking at language, spoken to characters, not to mention dialogue, internal dialogue and stage direction or play settings. And so it's really a complex art form. And once I discovered comic books, I pretty much checked out of the world. I was like, okay, you know what, I don't want to watch my mom getting beat anymore. You know, I don't want to watch. I don't want to get beat by my mom's boyfriends anymore. What am I going to do? I would just get a stack of comic books and I would just be basically had a fort built in my closet and I would just sit there and read all day. I'd go to school, go to school, get through it, come home and read all day. And so this type of this like this idea of the fantastic.  And I remember being on the playground and this kid, Matthew May, which is his real name, screw him, he basically was like, you know, as a kid you want to play whatever TV show or movies out. Let's play Star Wars, let's play whatever.  You could be Dark Vader or Chewbacca. Not Darth Vader, mind you, Dark Vader. And I remember like, okay, and I remember going back into Miss Mianowich's classroom and getting, you know, those big yardsticks and I came up with a little lightsaber and start smacking these kids with it. I was like, okay, I'll be the biggest, baddest, blackest force of evil in the entire galaxy. Yeah, absolutely I will. And I remember just like that rage as even, you know, this is kindergarten now. This is this rage I was feeling there and I realized that the stuff that I love didn't include me. Spider-Man kind of books didn't include me. Superman didn't include me. Like nothing included what I looked like at all. And so then part of me was like, this is not okay. And now as a parent, these things still don't include my daughter. And this is the, we're in 2016 and you have like, you know, this like the diverse book movement that's been, you know, slowly gathering steam now. But I realized that, you know, this stuff, this the firmament of the fantastic is our stuff as well. Every single culture has a mythological tradition. Has a tradition of the fantastic. Has a tradition of magic, whether it's shamanic magic, traditional magic, we have that. But we have been so excluded in being as a black person. There's probably very few cultures in the world that produce as much culture as we do that has influence. I was telling Samantha here earlier today I was at the southern part of the Philippines in Karkar on the island of Cebu, which is right before you get to Mindanao. And there's a burnt out church in the middle of a forest that had Snoop Dogg spray painted on it. And I'm like, we are in the middle of literally nowhere.  And I'm like, wait a minute, we are everywhere, but we aren't there. It's kind of like if only our echos existed, but the source of the echos gets erased. We're just there all the time, whether it's corn rolls getting called boxer braids lately or people saying that some celebrity invented Bantu knots like Bjork have been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so Paul Mooney, everybody wants to be one, but nobody wants to be one. So, and I realize that in the stuff I love, like the science fiction fantasy speculative fiction that we don't have enough of a presence. And Mark Dairy has this essay called Black to the Future, and he's the funny white journalist who kind of like coined the idea of Afrofuturism, which probably people are hearing a lot about right now. And the entire black existence is science fiction. I mean, white people came from a different planet with superior technology, landed some place new, took people, abducted them, and landed them onto a different planet.  And there's something really kind of like mind blowing about that when you really start parsing it out. Like, you know, and then as Man was saying earlier, but we came from a sci-fi abduction story to superheroes because how are we even still alive? How is it that we've come from, I mean, we're watching the contemporary police brutality. I mean, Jim Crow, not that long ago. Historical time, slavery, not that long ago. And if we look at it through a trauma lens, people expected to be over and healthy right away. No. That's not really going to happen. So now we're in this time frame now where barriers to entry for cultural production are almost non-existent. Like, my phone and my pocket is probably more powerful than the computers in the Viking space mission. I have a recording studio, I have a movie studio, and so now we can create culture and disseminate culture at a flick of a button. And so for me, it was how do I get more black kids, you know, or kids who identify as black or they're biracial or whatever to get involved in this geek stuff because I think the geek stuff is very powerful. I mean, you look at the top 20 movies of all time, all but two are sci-fi or fantasy. All but two. Of all time. But then you look at how many people are people of color are actually in the first three leads. Doesn't exist. How many women are in the first three leads? Doesn't exist. So that's problematic. I love this stuff. Because it's our modern mythology. Grant Morrison, comic book author, saying that the comic book that we have now, the idols, they're basically cave paintings that we're touching up and making them new for newer generations to come from behind us. And for me, it's so important for representation because if you look at black representation in popular culture and media, it's not three-dimensional. It's tropes. You know, Hillary Clinton and her super predator things are coming back to Haunter now and the idea that we can't do anything more than just, you know, be violent or have violence done to us or that we produce other culture for people to consume but we don't get any part of it. I'm like Buster Rhymes, hip-hop MC said, hip-hop, for example, is the only art form that makes money for people who don't even like it or the people who produce it. And so what I wanted to do was really kind of take back maybe it's a little bit Marxist of me but I wanted to kind of create production avenues for black people to get into this geek stuff because I think it's really powerful and important. And so I allied myself with a couple of people about 15, 16, 17 years now where I did a huge comic book drive. I was like, okay, because there's so many kids in the hood, you know, and there's that whole thing whether it's true or not that prisons are built by third-grade literacy rates and so we were like, we want all these books and so we got, I think 13,000 comic books donated to us and we just gave them out into the neighborhoods where we know that people were under resourced. We just gave them out and so we would have basically comic book clubs and people were looking at us, you know, big black guys tattooed whatever, like, we have perverts coming in with comic books, like, you know, but we came in and we were like, we were giving comic books out and so we would actually go to libraries, church basements, and read comic books with kids and teach them and the literacy was incredible because they actually got to imagine themselves. We started with Spiderman because Spiderman outside of his alter ego Peter Parker, his face was covered so anybody could be in that mask.  A black woman protagonist in an ostensibly science fiction novel was unbelievable. You know people, we always get told that we don't exist in this space but then you have Bill Delaney, you have George Schuyler in the 20s, you have Tenerife Dewey, who's Stephen Barnes' wife, you've got N.K. Jemisin, you have Nalo Hopkinson, Eddie Ork before, you have all these people, Aizidjama Everett, who's local, and we are there we are creating these worlds because I think that we've been prescribed worlds for so long whether they're fantastic, I mean like, how am I supposed to like connect with friends or Seinfeld or anything else because there's a white cultural default which is fine to a degree I'm not saying that you can't be a different color and appreciate somebody else's culture, I'm not saying what I'm saying is that when I'm erased completely when I'm omitted, and don't be Native American or Asian in America you don't even exist in popular culture and so there's nothing wrong with, you know, we want that, that's why I'm part of this group called the Nerds of Color or websites at thenerdsofcolor.org and it's every possible color, sexuality class, and we're all writing about this stuff because we're finding things A, we critique but B, we promote a lot of people doing this stuff and for me it's important because I think there's nothing more amazing than the activation of an imagination especially for people who are oppressed because if you don't have the ability to dream yourself out of your situation, you're stuck and you have to be able to deform the idea that freedom, liberation is even possible, which is a supreme act of science fiction and so being able to do that, I think we've done some good, I mean like we were here in January, we I'm the co-founder of the Black Comets Arts Festival and it happens over Martin Luther King Day weekend every second year this year and the kids are just like you mean there's black superheroes that people are making and like you see their faces and just this world of possibility in their eyes and I guess the highest form of praise I ever received was from my daughter who's eight now but at this time she was seven and she's like, daddy, I was like, yeah because if you have kids they have that act of where you're like, aw dang like, you know, daddy I'm like, yes, baby, she's like, you're doing really good work and I was like, why am I doing good work? She's like, well because me and some other kids, you know, we get to be in space, we get to fly spaces, we get to have powers because other people aren't thinking about that and did I cry?  Because we see so much tragedy every single day. Most of us have developed a really thick skin, social and psychological psychic warfare skin whereas I can talk about race through Star Trek and talk about that. I can talk about the idea of taking back your community through vigilanteism in comic books and really talking about these things and so more than just it being a place for for fantastic representation of oneself in these context, I think it's also a place where we can really get people to start being activated about things. So, thank you I'd like to now take this opportunity to discuss some of your views in terms of the relationship between expressive mediums such as poetry, humor and comics and activism. So, clearly activism can take on many forms depending on one's own interests and strengths. What advice do you have for others wishing to use their particular talents and interests to promote discussion or effect change and anybody can just jump in whoever is most comfortable. Show up. That's really number one.  Thank you so much for showing up. Every action starts with that first movement of presence, right? Would black poets speak out? It happened because people wanted to show up. We wanted to do things and, you know, not everyone has the same skill set.  Some people are, you know, like during the civil rights marches, there were plenty of people making plates and passing them out to the people who were passing as they were marching on their way to D.C. So we need people at all points of those levels, but first you have to say, I can show up. You have to look at your hands and say, what can I bring? You know, you can bring poetry. You can bring fantasy, literary writing. But first we need you to bring you. Oh, sorry. Oh, I would say not being afraid. For a long time, I was afraid because I lived in a closet.  So it was that and living in a closet and I had to learn how to shatter both of those barriers in order to bring about issues that affect folks. Some folks who will never be able to open their mouth and say, this is how I'm affected by this particular situation.  And I get emails sometimes from people saying, oh, like I was in Detroit a couple months ago. And it was mostly white audience and I talked about race and some stuff I saw in Fox News and this guy sent me an email afterwards and he said, oh, I enjoyed the set, but I'm glad that you kept the race stuff to a minimum. Like it makes people very uncomfortable, but if it makes you uncomfortable, stop doing it. I think knowing the difference between being an activist and being activated I think we're talking about this earlier. I think that artists people who want to make a difference burn themselves out too quickly because what the deal was like, you want to come up and play chess? No, I got to go to the rally and I got to spring my words and show my art.  And you start resenting your talent. Then you start moving away from your talent because you use it only in the service of one thing as opposed to healing yourself with your gifts. And I think that there has to be a fine balance. And I think that if more people who do activist work became more activated and know when to turn it off and when to turn it on I think we wouldn't lose so many people. I don't think we'd burn so many people out. Thank you. And then this next question I just kind of wanted to know on a personal level what have you learned any of you, what have you learned in the time between beginning to share your medium in this context and today? Were there any surprises along the way through this journey of sharing your talents and using it for the greater good? I've realized how many people of color are invested in capital W whiteness? How many? Because there's a very comforting thing to be a part of the mainstream.  And as if it's wrong it's an anomaly of some sort. Because we live in a world that's white default and everybody subscribes to that particular default and when you start doing something different especially if you look at geek spaces if you ever want to hate the world read comments after an article about race and superheroes you will hate the earth by the third post. And it's because it's always been the province of particular demographic and now we want to take things differently.  There's a problem there that's very terrifying but then also a lot of the heat came from people of color who were invested in certain ideas into them and so when you are like the trailblazer or the herald of a new idea you take a brunt of that, you are almost responsible for that shift in consciousness and shift in perception and once you start changing the way you see and experience things that's when a lot of the danger comes out that's when a lot of the fear comes out because you start grasping at straws and start punching at you because you've just disturbed their baseline for X amount of years and all the color are really invested just as much as white folks are in a white supremacist construct. Thank you. I want to add to that as far as things that were surprising also yes the investment is totally there but young people and how they are are really they really give no fucks and the respectability politics are not there in the same way and that's refreshing, that's what gives me hope in Austin after Sandra Bland died in Waller County there was young people, college students organizing a silent vigil and protest march to the capital, to the Texas state capital they did that with no permit they did that with social media organizing they did that in ways that I had not seen before where it was the issue at hand what's surprising to me is when you embrace your freedom, true freedom and you stay focused on the matter at hand which is justice which is really quality if we're going to go for that unapologetically so much stuff can happen amazing things can happen when you make space for that they did this again protest with police escort with no permit over 300 people marched to the Texas state capital I'm talking Ted Cruz land here I'm talking Abbott as governor Jesus and without incident it was in silence it was beautiful, it was amazing what they also did was they said we're going to line up in a certain way I said huh what now I was there they asked me to come and share a poem I'm like I got you, I got the poems but then watching they were like we're going to line up black people first I was like you can do that at a protest tell people where to stand all people protest, no black people first because they understood that we are the ones putting our lives on the line and you are not going to marginalize us you are not going to put us to the side when we are out here demanding justice for our own lives they said black people first then brown people next then other next then white people in the back of the march and then everybody followed there was no incident and everybody respected that and everybody knew why and then we marched all the way from east Austin across I-35 which is the main highway that cuts through Texas running from north to south 6th street right through I believe it was pretty no there was some festival going on but there is always a music festival in the live music capital of the world and we marched right down 6th street again in silence hundreds of people in that order got to the steps of the Texas state capital it was amazing and then they said we are not going to do any interviews with any major media outlets until every brown blogger, twitter media journalist gets a comment first I said you can do that they said yeah so for me that has been very surprising and warming and encouraging to see we don't have to follow the masters rules once you start saying that once you start doing that that's what you see now that's what you see with the disruptions that's what you see with the outcries that's what you see with the organizing in new and brilliant ways is because they change in the rules and we need to catch up that's the future alright thank you so much thank you for having us unfortunately I would like to thank our panelists for their thoughtful commentary on the subject of blackness and social activism in America I'd also like to thank our audience for coming out this evening if you would like to be kept in the loop on future events through the African American center please be sure to leave your email address on the sign in sheet on your way out thank you and have a good evening thank you


Are we all here? We have done a lot of talking and talk for those of you who have been here for the first week. We have done a lot of listening. We hopefully also had a lot of conversations, so we hope that today will be a space for a lot of conversations, for unpacking some of the issues, for really having candid conversations. Let me start with a couple of housekeeping announcements so we can navigate this day together.  Take it seriously and follow the green signs. The opening and closing planaries will be here. Lunch and refreshments will be served in the area where you checked in, just outside here. And the parallel sessions will be taking place here in the ballroom, as well as on the first floor, if you take the lifts, just outside here on the right. Up to the first floor, there are two breakout rooms, Opel and Aquamarine, and two of the three parallel sessions will be taking place on the first floor. During the lunch break today, there will be a short film screening in here from Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, entitled Africa's Cooked and Sinking Communities. Please feel free to also watch the movie here over lunchtime. And then, of course, we hope that you'll join us for an evening reception from 10 to 7 p.m. in the grass pool area on level five in this building. The restrooms are outside here on the left, and there are also restrooms on the first floor opposite the corridor from the breakout rooms. There's a smoking area outside the ballroom for those who need it. And then, quite importantly, we had a lot of registrations and we had a lot of people underestimating how long it takes to get here in the morning traffic and rush hour. If you do leave and you're not intending to come back, please put your badge in the glass bowl that is at the registration desk because we have a limited number of people that we may admit in the day.  The organizers and volunteers wear blue badges, and everyone else think badges like this one. You see someone with a blue badge and have a question. This is the right person to ask. Wi-Fi is open access. Search for Accor and then you enter your email address and your password. We'll be taking videos and photos during the event and the planaries will be live streamed to our YouTube channel. And if you prefer not to be photographed and videoed, please let the check-in desk know right now. And this is the end of the housekeeping announcements. Now, I hope you have at least one person at your table that you don't know already. Is that true? No, Tracy, I think it's time for you to move to a table where you have company. And I'll hand over to my colleague Shaban. I introduced myself. My name is Bettina Kuller. I'm with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. I'll be taking you through the plenary session this morning with my colleague Shaban Mawanda from the Climate Center as well. And Shaban, will you lead us through an introductory exercise? Thank you. Yes, you're welcome to develop in the climate. So just like my colleague Bettina has mentioned, let's take just a few minutes, I'll gauge how the introduction is going. And then we will transition to the next segment of the welcome. So please look around your table, it's self-organized. You can select who's going to lead this segment. But it should be possible that in the next three to four minutes, you should be able to know each other. I will tell you the secret around this. But make sure that you know each one on the table. OK? So self-organized, I'll give you three to four minutes, starting now. Minute to go. OK, two minutes granted. OK, five, four, three, one. And stop. So if you can hear me, can you clap only once? If you can hear me, can you clap only once? Excellent. So I hope that you got somebody new that you're going to know in this session. And the beauty is we are still here. We'll have some breaks. So whoever you haven't been introduced to, I think you'll have the opportunity. So Bettina, what is next? Yes, now that we know, hopefully, who's at your table, let me call on Tracy from IED to give us some opening and welcoming remarks. Tracy, floor is yours. And I'm imagining there are others watching online. Claire, is that right? Yes, so good morning, good afternoon, good evening for those that are watching us online. Welcome, everyone. How many people are coming to DNC Days for the first time? Wow, amazing. That's quite a number. And those that have been in DNC Days over the years, a good number as well.  So we are really excited to welcome you back to DNC Days. We last met in person in 2019, four years ago. So we have survived many things. We've survived COVID. We've survived floods and hurricanes and everything. So it's good to see each other again. I was here in conversations of, oh, I last saw you four years ago. We've been seeing each other online. So we're really happy to be back as DNC Days family. I wanted to talk a bit about the history of DNC Days and I think for good reason, because you can see the numbers of new people that are joining DNC Days, young people coming up and others coming into these processes. So DNC Days has been around for the last 20 years. Can you imagine? That's a long, long time. And we are giving a brief history for a number of reasons. One is the many years that we've spent. Last year, we made 20 years and we started reflecting as partners. Do we still need DNC Days or not? Because during COVID, we never had DNC Days. We had it online. But we thought we wanted to do an evaluation of if DNC Days is still necessary or not. At the Copenhagen Glasgow, we didn't do DNC Days in person. But so many people were asking, why are you not here? Where is DNC Days despite the other events? And we said we are in reflection mode. We want to understand if this is needed or not. Because we are not here just for the sake of meetings but we should be shifting something. So we didn't do DNC Days. We decided to do an evaluation report of the 20 years of DNC Days. So when we did the report, some of the things that came out also surprised some of us who also joined much later amidst DNC Days. So it started in 2002 and it was known as adaptation day. It was not development and climate days and this was at COP 8 in Berlin. And it was practitioners coming together at share experiences to learn together alongside the negotiations. In 2004, it was expanded to add development with the thinking of is it just climate or we need to look at climate and development. So it became adaptation and development day, 2004. And conversations started. How do we link climate to development? What do we do with people like us, researchers, CSOs, academia coming together to have those conversations? In 2007, it was renamed Development and Climate Days, reflect work that is progressing on mainstreaming climate into development. And lots of innovation started coming and getting local voices into the conversations, video streaming from communities, bringing in grassroot voices. It started shifting, numbers started increasing, and a lot of activism increased, communication increased. And new partners came on board, those that initially were not part of DNC Days. So we did an evaluation and our report was published this year, which we'll find on the website of IID RCC as well. But there are a number of interesting findings that came out of the 20 years of DNC Days. So DNC Days influenced the initial conversations on adaptation when the negotiations were talking about mitigation and adaptation was not a serious issue. It is this team that made the noise about adaptation being important and why we need to do it. And that shifted the conversation in the negotiation rooms, focusing on adaptation. I was surprised myself reading the reports to learn that DNC Days started talking about loss and damage in 2012. Some of you might be here in the last two, three years, but this family here was talking about loss and damage as early as 2012 and pushing for conversation to those that are experiencing impacts of climate change in different ways. So these conversations have shipped the loss and damage conversations since that time. And we know now that the fund has been established and funding is starting to trickle in. So this team has done a lot of work. We're not just sitting here, but reflecting through this, we see that it's been really useful. The NAPS, the NAPAS, DNC Days started those conversations. Are they working? Where is the money? How does it work? And with different civil society organizations bringing in the findings, what is working? What is not working? And also trying to feed into that. And this was as early as 2002 talking about NAPS and NAPAS at DNC Days. And then later on, conversations around local elite adaptation, lived experiences into conversations and asking ourselves how do we bring in grassroots voices? A number of organizations started sponsoring young people to come for DNC Days or finding indigenous people to come for DNC Days. I remember before COVID, we used to put up a pitch for young people to share what they are bringing on climate and picking those with interesting projects to come to DNC Days and share with us what they are doing. I see Sheila there. She started bringing young people into DNC Days talking about urban issues and all that. So it shifted from just adults, but also including the youth. And RCC started bringing in how people in pet beds and climate change, the games and the fun. Pablo, I don't know if Pablo is around, but he's been very influential in terms of communicating climate change from the science to what people can understand. We've also worked around issues of coherence. Marrakech's partnership FAO has been very strong on bringing that into the conversation. And then last year, we started, how does this link to LLD? There are conversations on LLD everywhere, but how do we link with that? How do we link with CBA, London Climate Action Week, so that the messaging is coherent and feeding into this. But amidst all this, other than the history and coming back together, I'm talking about this history because of the person who initiated this DNC Days conversation. Professor Salimha was the initiator of the idea of DNC Days. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him because he was in the negotiations, but wondering how do others come into these conversations? How do they contribute? How do they influence? Yes, there's the text negotiating, text and whatever, but who talks about implementation? What is working and what is not working? So the whole idea of DNC Days is an idea that was originated by Dr. Salim. Unfortunately, we lost him this year. When we did the evaluation, I was talking to Claire, our home's person, and saying that they want to invite Salim as the grandfather of DNC Days to come and talk about history of DNC Days, where we've come from and where we're going. So it shouldn't be me talking about it. It should have been Salim. So that was a sad moment we're going to do in the next session. I know I went to really remember him and talk about him, but what happened is that during the evaluation, we went back to the question of reflecting. Do we need this? Salim has been arguing about inaction and all that. We felt that there are many events at hope. It's a circus with events everywhere. We are not connected, we are not aligned. So we discussed and agreed that we want to reframe DNC Days into an accountability space. Because we've talked a lot, we used to do DNC Days across themes, agriculture, finance, and we had four themes, but now we've moved away from themes because nothing is working. The IPCC reports are saying we're not even up to speed. MDCs are not adding up. So for DNC Days going forward, we thought that we need to ask ourselves why are we not progressing? What should we do? Can we talk about the difficult conversations we're not talking about right now? So we agreed on three questions that we needed to discuss at this DNC Days event. We should be saying maybe DNC Day because we're doing one day instead of the two days that we used to do. So we have three questions that we are going to discuss. One question is on decolonizing climate finance. We've talked about climate finance for a long, long time, but we still continue to see money not getting to the local level, big organizations getting money, small organizations are not getting the money. We've talked about it for long, but why is it not shifting? So we're not here. We're not interested in sessions that are saying, oh, we're doing this project here. This DNC Days is different. It's about answering why are we not progressing? Why do we need, what do we need to do differently? Can we talk about those difficult conversations with power dynamics that have shaped how we are implementing climate programs, how we are financing, shaped by post-colonial legacies and power dynamics and positionalities of different regions. Those are the kind of conversations we are looking for in this room for DNC Days, looking at the distributive justice of how finance is getting to the local levels. So we need to be bold more than we've been before. And the second question is looking at inequity in climate partnerships. Partnerships are shaped by inequity. We are not being honest. We are not talking about these issues and pretend they don't exist what they do. So we are hoping that in these sessions we'll be able to bring out those issues. And the third one is accountability for the Paris falls. We are talking about emissions and industries and organizations that are funding and facilitating all these processes. But who is talking about it? And we're starting to lose the old people who have been visionary about these things and they've been frustrated. I was talking to Sheila. I called her my intellectual grandmother. She's frustrated that we are not moving. They are frustrated. We need to do more. We need to get young people into this. We need to shift things and be more accountable, both internally in our organizations and externally in what we are doing. So I think that's how we've shaped the day. We have very interesting sessions which will be introduced later. And we owe all this to Professor Salim Haq, unfortunately, who is not with us. And at this moment I will hand over to Claire and Bettina, take us through a session of remembering Salim. If it wasn't for his vision, we wouldn't be here. Thank you very much. It was in many DNC days where Salim would, in the opening comment, take up his tie, demonstratively and say, this is not the space to wear a tie. Let's talk on an even playing field and let's be candid and open to move things. And so we have prepared, IV has prepared a short video to remember Salim. And we have the video, please. Enjoy. For those of you who have not had the pleasure to meet Salim, Bettina Salim. Let's go at the cop. And it was set up as a non-cop event where the non-negotiators who are interested in tackling climate change would get together and share experiences and learn from each other how to tackle the problem of climate change rather than negotiate text on a piece of paper. And this event is designed to share that experience, not in a boring presentation of PowerPoint way, but in an active dynamic, people getting to know each other.  I have a preferred term, which is climate injustice. Justice is an ideal that we want to get to. Injustice is something staring you in the face. It's happening. And so my question is, are you going to deal with that? That's the element in the room. Something being done about loss and damage and all we got is a dialogue to talk more about it. That's absolutely unacceptable. So when they stand with that podium just there, shortly, and declare victory and breakthrough, they'll be lying. We don't want to have this agreement in and of ourselves and we don't need another negotiating bench that is quite true. But the words are a piece of paper, no matter. The clash that unresigned those divisions between whether it's not and whether it will work out is what matters. And that is a very, very fundamental issue. Solve the problem, attack the problem and those that know it will be out of ignorance, they won't be happy because they aren't convinced. They are doing it and... Thank you for the IED team to... It's a sad moment. And at the same time, I'm sure Salim would have not wanted us to be sad, but to continue what he really felt so dearly about. And that is to really make a difference, to take action and to move forward in a bold and courageous spirit. So with this, I would like to invite you to take all sadness and all courage that you have in your hearts. If you're new, Salim or not, at your table, share with each other what you think you would be doing if you were 10 times bolder than you are. You might already be very bold, but Salim encouraged us all to be a lot more bolder than we are in real life. So at the table, take a couple of minutes and share with your colleagues at the table what you would be doing in the sphere of climate justice if you were 10 times bolder. And if you're joining online, feel free to have a quiet reflection by yourself. Please be courageous and share with your table. If I was 10 times bolder, I would do... See if you can come to a close and we'll take a couple of snippets from the tables if you'd like to share. Thank you. Let's hear anyone who'd like to share what you have heard at your table. What is a 10 times bolder action that is coming? Anyone who would like... There are a couple of roving microphones over here, Shaban. Thank you, what have you heard? And hold your microphone. Good morning, my name is Munira. Personally, I shared this with the group and said we can long accept the world by playing by the rules. So we have to... I'm not asking anyone to bend the rules, but I think we should. All the rules have to change that. Thank you, thank you. 10 times bolder it is. Any other thoughts that were shared at your table? It makes Shaban work very hard with the microphone. Yes, over to you. From this table we have Kitaka Tengkas. Somebody here says she would have loved to be a lawyer and consider strategic litigation fighting out the part that we... And then also here somebody said she would love to shut down the system and return power back to the people. I think that's our unanimous position here. We are worried about the status quo on this table. We have as Buddha who shut down your process and give power back to the people. Thank you. Any other thoughts? 10 times bolder. Yeah. If we are 10 times bolder, we discuss that. We have to strengthen 10 times more the movement building in supporting the most vulnerable communities to secure justice rather than spending more time here talking than talking. So that's our thought. Thank you. More action. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Neetu Chaudhary and I'm new to GNC. If I'm 10 times bolder, what would I do? I use all my power and technology to show people that how their grandchildren will look like and live and how will they suffer if we don't make change now. So I flood the whole social media and internet with that information because when they see what the future will look like, definitely it'll come from inside to make a change. Whether it's a big industrialist or it's any rat picker, anybody, it is. Thank you. This is Ashish from Bangladesh. As being from Bangladesh, we have a special accountability to him as we have worked closely, very closely. In these comics, we have started on being brave enough, being bold enough to respect her and we as an alliance, Climate Justice Alliance in Bangladesh, we are bringing the elements of challenging the unjust systems in the cop mechanism and process, especially bringing the issues of double standard of different parties and the hegemony in the system. We are bringing the voices in different hubs, sessions, public relations in the discussion. That's our commitment and downward accountability to him. Thank you. Thank you. And the last comment over here. Hi, everyone. I'm Edith Santian from Kenya and we've been ten times bolder. Actually, we would unite the whole world and fix the problem. No global laws, no global south. It's about unity. It's not about the camera work. It's not about the fiction. It's all about the reality and the real action. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I can see Shaban says one more. Shaban. Hi, everyone. Rachel Gore-Fried from the U.S.C. So if our table talked about how if we're really bold, we would have an alternative cop led by civil society organizations, funded by philanthropy without taking up any space or power. And with the last day, being governments invited just to listen to the solutions proposed and the statements made. I know that this was somewhat proposed when there was going to be a cop in Chile in Santiago. That didn't end up happening, but I think we can make it happen. It is now, thank you for this. I hope you can keep the ambitions that were shared at your table, your own ambitions, what you heard at heart. It's up to us to make it happen. And it's now my great pleasure to invite Sakef, Salim Zahn, who's also with ICAT, the research institute that Salim founded to the stage to say a few words. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. My name is Sakef. I'm Salim Zahn. And on behalf of my family and our ICAT family, we're all very, very grateful and moved that we're able to commemorate and take a moment to reflect on the work that my father had started. Similar to him, I've started with a tie. So I will take it off on stage. Because as Sakef mentioned, this is not about us being in our little negotiation groups and our little blocks and our set mindsets, but what really the development in climate days for us to take a moment in between all of that chaos to have a little pause, to make new friends, to talk to old friends and recharge ourselves, to be able to keep the fight going, to be able to keep the work going that is actually very, very critical. So what I would encourage all of you is to spend the day talking to people, recharge yourselves, have some good food, have some good conversations and hopefully we get the courage to keep on and be bold. Thank you so much. So one thing Salim will say always at DNC days is the personal challenge to everyone is to meet at least three people and to speak to them and have a conversation with them that you have never met before. I hope you can live up to the challenge. It's increased difficulty because you only have one day instead of two. I recognize this, but I think we can do it. So let's try. It is now my pleasure to ask Tom Mitchell to come and give some welcome remarks from IUD, Tom of here. Tina, thank you very much. So I am here on behalf of all of the partners who are behind DNC days. And so you can see them all on the screen here. I'd like to particularly call out our collaboration with the Red Cross Climate Centre. Tina, thank you so much. And actually I was reflecting about this is one of those moments where you take time to reflect and you think back to your experiences of DNC days. And actually I was remembering back even before that. And I was maybe just starting my PhD or a master's student, something like that. And I was invited by the Red Cross Climate Centre to come to the Hague to have a discussion for the first time about whether we can consider adaptation, disaster risk reduction and development as part of the same set and continuum. And I remember very clearly meeting on the beach and I'm going to get the pronunciation badly wrong in Schkeveningen. And just looking around as a master's student and seeing this kind of very small community of people who at that time were really talking about these issues for the first time. And then I fast forwarded, I think one or two years to my first cop. I met Salim. And Salim walked up to me and he said, do you know we really do need young people to take off his bike because we really aren't going where we need to get to? And he reached out and he shook my hand. And inside his hand, he got a little slip of paper. He said to me, that's my mobile number. I think even in those days, he'd only just got a mobile, there's my mobile number and there's my apartment. He said, in the evenings we go and we smoke and we plot. And so as a really kind of, I think at that time, I don't know, maybe early 20s, as a, and I put on my kind of bravery hat and I walked into Salim's apartment. And I remember very clearly to this day that there was a group of, you know, at that stage, I don't know, 50-something year old men. The atmosphere was thick with smoke. And walked in and I sat down and they said, welcome, welcome. And then they were having an argument, they were having an argument between them. And I'm not gonna name who was around that table, but some of you will know that people go around that table. And the argument was, how can we get adaptation for the first time formally recognized within the negotiations as something that we could do about it that was focused on action? And they were talking about which minister needed to be, you know, needed to be influenced and who needed to be suppressed and so on. And that was the lead-in for those of you who'll remember it to the adoption of the Nairobi work program on adaptation, which was really the first time that people were talking about that. And it was Salim who was really at the heart of every single component of the tactics of that. And he took me to one side and I remember in that kind of really smoky apartment. And he said, Tom, and he said, look at these guys around here. He said, these aren't gonna be here forever and this is gonna be a long fight and we need young people like you to take up this fight. And at that time, there are now people in this room who were equally the same age as me, who are now here in positions of different levels of power, really still taking the fight. And the reason why we need to still take the fight is actually, yes, there's been progress, but equally there are severe challenges. Let's just quickly reflect, right? The adaptation gap report said that we've only got 10% of the funding needed to actually tackle the challenge. We need much, much more each year. And even when we do have the money flowing, it doesn't get to where it needs to get to. IID research said that maybe 10% actually gets to the communities who need it most. And of that 10%, only 6% has actually ever been designed with the communities who actually need the money. And then we have an evaluation in 2021, a group of evaluations that came to the conclusion that most of the money that actually did get to the ground, at least didn't improve the situation and potentially made it worse. Though not enough money, doesn't get to where it needs to get to. It's not designed with communities and when it gets there, it may do the wrong thing. Though if we're sitting here thinking that there's some level of congratulations for ourselves, actually the work has barely started. We really need to be here as a community of people who do stand up and ask the tough questions. And if there's somebody in this room that you think actually holds power or in your organizations, you see there are hand breaks, the rules that we've been talking about, that mean that you don't do what you need to do. Take the moment today to have that conversation. This is a safe space where we can challenge each other in a way where we may not be able to do when we're in slightly corporate pavilions and that we're surrounded by cardboard walls or whatever we've got and everybody's wearing the suits and being polite to each other. Let's have this as a day where we do at least give ourselves the possibility of being a little impolite. I say this as a British person, it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, but there you go. I just also wanted to just take a moment to thank all of those people who've worked so hard to put this session together. I know there's been a four year gap and I know there's been lots of deep discussions about whether we should do it, how should we do it and so on. But I think this cop for me has really underscored the fact that it's a right decision to bring back a community of people who can talk together and challenge ourselves to have those discussions because we can't sit there in the cop pretending that everything is going the way that we want it to be. And I think Tracy, particularly to you, I just wanted to say a few words about how much you have been a real visionary in putting this back together. You've taken together with Claire a huge amount of responsibility with our partners as well in shaping these days. And can you join me, please, in a round of applause for Tracy and the colleagues who came today? Without further ado, let me pass back to Bettina and we'll get into the details of our discussion. Thank you, Bettina. One other thing, I forgot to say. You might have seen our colleagues here with cameras around and leaning in with microphones and Maryse is over there with the microphone. So the team has been for the last, a year and a half has been making a documentary about Celine's life. And let's just say there was quite a big shift in the way the documentary would be put together because of Celine's passing. And so the team are here to witness essentially what Celine put together and if you see them leaning over you and capturing a little bit of conversation, that's because there is an opportunity for the documentary team to hear the voices essentially in Celine's honor and challenging and taking forward the agenda that Celine was fighting for. And so do take a moment to speak to them, say hello, I'm sure if you'd like to do a piece to camera they may be able to accommodate that and so on and particularly those who've got anecdotes and insights into a partnership with Celine. So welcome them in, they are friends with us today. And if you have an opportunity to chat and support them then please do because they've got a tough job of appreciating this documentary, thank you so much. Having a very candid conversation that might cost you the job if it was documented please also feel free to be candid to the camera team to say give us a moment, it's a delicate moment. I think we sometimes need delicate moments and sometimes we need to really have that space. I'm sure you'll understand, thank you. It's now my pleasure to ask a couple of panelists. It's short and sharp and it's really gonna give us a bit of a snapshot of what happened at the negotiations at COP last week. Where are we now and what are we hoping for in the coming week of COP? We'll try and use as little acronyms as possible. Can I ask Ebony, Sheila and Megan to come here onto the stage and give us a bit of an insight. Please, join me here on stage. We will use as little acronyms as possible. It's not easy, but I think it's a short snapshot and thank you for joining me here. My referrals are on, you each have one. I think Ebony will give us a bit of an update. What happened in the first week of this year's COP? What are some of the breakthroughs, some of the challenges where we stuck a brief snapshot? And I'm not sure Megan, shall we start with you? Yeah, I'm a journalist for the charitable part of Reuters. My name is Megan Rowling. Been working on climate change for more than 15 years. We started our climate change coverage back in the mid 2000s, partly inspired by Selim actually, because I was doing a masters and I was looking at how aid agencies had started to work on climate change and I went to interview Selim as part of my research and also Tom actually, when he was working at the Institute for Development Studies. And the conclusion I think of my thesis was that there needs to be a much more focus on the communities on the frontline of climate change in terms of adaptation. And so yeah, I think without Selim, I don't think our coverage would have been anything like what it was with a focus on, has been with focus on the global sad. Anyway, in terms of what's happened here so far last week, obviously the big news was the operationalization of the loss and damage fund on the first day of COP, which I think was pretty unprecedented to have a decision taken like that on the first day of COP. And I think Selim would have been absolutely delighted that that happened because he wrote the last thing that he wrote for us. Thompson Reuters Foundation was an op-ed saying that the only reason he had joined the advisory committee for COP 28 was to have the loss and damage fund established here in Dubai. So I think from that perspective, he would have said mission accomplished and now what next to make sure that the loss and damage fund works effectively for communities on the ground because even though we have funds set up and they're on the, but in the first couple of days COP 28, more than $650 million was pledged to that fund by donors, that's just the start, right? And we don't know how the fund as yet is going to work exactly. There was a compromise done before COP 28 that it was going to be housed at the World Bank, but on a trial basis, that was a hard sort of one deal in terms of making sure that there were checks and balances on World Bank's role in the fund. And I think from our perspective, what we'll be looking at as journalists after this is indeed what happens with that money, where does that money go to and is it getting to the people that need it and there's many other things that need to be discussed in terms of how does it work between humanitarian agencies and the climate community. And so there's just a lot more work to do, but getting that fund was a key thing for Celine and so I'm very glad that that has happened. So that was one of the important things that happened at the start of COP and then the focus since on the global goal for adaptation, which needs to be a framework for the global goal on adaptation, which was enshrined in the Paris Agreement in 2015, but still eight years later, we don't really know what that means and the kind of signals it should be sending out to other people working on adaptation, many of them in this room. Unfortunately, the first week of COP28 did not go well at all on that front. There is not a text, there's not a draft text. And last night in the plenary, the closing, I'm not gonna go there with the acronyms, the technical bodies working on issues of COP28 had to basically say, we don't have a text on the global goal of adaptation and many countries, the US, EU Africa group, Canada and others basically came out and said we're very disappointed about that. And so the work will continue, obviously next week, but there'll be a lot to do to make sure that the global goal and adaptation framework comes out of this COP. I mean, that's the mandate it needs to do. And one of the fights, just going back to what Tom said, is about finance and adaptation finance and how many developing countries want to see a great deal more commitment and money coming through adaptation because there was a COP26, it was agreed that rich countries said that they would work towards doubling adaptation finance to 40 billion a year by 2025 and it's still only barely, it's still only around 25 billion according to the latest figures and actually has been going down. So that is obviously a fairly sorry state of affairs about it. I think that obviously developing countries want a better way of ensuring that adaptation finance will increase as the needs are increasing much faster and the adaptation finance gap is growing. So the fights in the coming week on adaptation and what I'm hearing will be focused on adaptation finance and that is going to be a key part of the negotiations. Thank you, Megan. Sheila, would you like to briefly introduce yourself and also say what's been happening from your perspective in COP26? So I'm Sheila Padel, I live in India. I'm a grassroots activist that works on issues of urban informality and a part of the family of some dwellers of the national and it's Indian of the great. I know Salim like forever. Just for your information, we were born in the same year, two months apart. So I always call him Salim Bhai because he's my brother. I'm actually elder than him. And so you could call me grandma. But I think that it was only when I began to interact with him in the DNC days. I think the first time was in my first couple of months on that I began to look at the ability the need to put development and climate together because in poor people's lives, it's always together. And this sort of silos from the UN down would make sense. So the first thing that I heard in this COP for the first time, both from people who are part of the negotiations and from all of us is that you're talking about development and climate together. And I think that I see myself as a person wants to look at how we can be outrageous in demanding accountability to ourselves and the constituencies we represent. I'm never going to be a negotiator. I'm never going to be part of all these formal arrangements. My work has made me intensely informal. And I think my role and contribution as one of the ambassadors of the race to resilience is actually to push our collective irreverence and the former institutions' inability to recognize our constituencies to come head on in a collusion when we win the battle. And I think we can only win that battle if we bring the challenges of decolonization, of demonstrating the power of aggregation of what our constituencies represent and constantly shoving it in the face of all the negotiators and all two people who write all those things. Used to be much more comfortable when selling than it was. I don't know. I think we need a big group of people amongst all of you to be the interlocutors. But I think that we need to do that if we really want his spirit to stay on. Because, you know, Sakeb and all of the people in ICANN can give us all this very nice, they gave us this very nice thing, saying, this is Salim's office. And we all have to become Salim's office and do all the things that we can do in producing the chain of evidence building and aggregation that produced the legitimacy for his voice. And I think we need to do that. We need to be irreverent. But also, what I'm thinking about is how many years it took him to be an adaptation? So what's the next thing that we need to do? Because it probably takes seven, eight years and it doesn't have anything to do with all these targets and stuff like that. But I think that our role and contribution is to produce aggregation and turn it accountability and financing systems that push this top-down stuff. And my message to all of you who are institutions and interlocutors with Southern networks who are in the North, you also have to change the architecture of your relationships with organizations in the Northern South. Because you end up inevitably becoming part of the North to South accountability system, which is very one way. It doesn't look at the things we need to do on the ground to make change happen. So I think that's my message. And I hope that when we meet next time and I love your thing about accountability days because that's what, you know, everything has to be accountability to be vulnerable. So thank you very much for inviting me here. Thank you, Sheila. And I love having so many Salim's officers and having a movement to take this forward. I think it's what it is. Thank you, Sheila. Ebony, from your side, what's been happening week one? Where do you think of Ebony from IED? Thank you so much, Bettina. Hi, everybody. I'm Ebony Holland. I'm the Nature Climate Policy Lead at IED. I just fiercely agree with everything that Megan and Sheila have just said. I think week one has been long. It's been tiring. Once we've worked out how to get around the actual crop campus, things will hopefully be a little bit smoother in week two. However, there are some deep fractions happening in the negotiations, which Megan has already pointed out. I won't copy those points. I think there is a real struggle ahead of us to make sure that things that this community care about, adaptation, locally led initiatives, really ensuring that we're flipping the power dynamics in these processes really come through in week two. I think for me and the sorts of things that we work on at IED and with partners, this accountability that's already been mentioned so far is really, really key. It's about ensuring that the decisions made within the formal negotiations halls and all of the things that are going on on the outside, that those decisions, the commitments, the announcements, people are accountable to those. I think cops come and go, big conferences come and go, people get a lot of credibility, organizations get a lot of credibility for announcing finance pledges, commitments to work with communities, et cetera, but there's not a lot of follow-through on that. And I think the really touching memorial video that was shared for Celine really pointed to his views on inside our cop. And interestingly, this year, there's 107,000 people registered for cop and we know that the vast majority of those are not in the negotiations hall, so we need to make sure that that accountability approach is across the board and really, you know, looking at ways to transform the system, really looking to shake up those power dynamics. We can talk a lot more throughout the day about the really great work that's going on in this room across many here, but I think for the moment, I might pause there. Thanks, Bettina. Right, thank you. And very briefly, for each one of you, what do you hope will happen next week?  What needs to happen next? One of the key things that's expected and hoped for out of this cop is a deal on phasing out fossil fuels with time limit and not an emphasis on abatement of emissions with technologies like carbon capture and storage that aren't able to deliver. So, yeah, I think because, you know, we don't often talk so much about mitigation in this space of DNC days, but as a report from the Global Tipping Points report yesterday that came out from more than 200 researchers said we don't limit global warming to the Paris Agreement goals, then it will practically be impossible to adapt and, you know, will be, as Salim said, fully into the era of loss and damage. So that's what we need. We need that deal on phasing out fossil fuels. Thank you so much, my manchila. This particular cop is very interesting because it's actually a potential butting of heads between everybody who's producing petroleum and those who want to get rid of it. And it's very interesting to hear and to see the dynamics that will either produce that or dilute that. And I think that all our presence here and our collective chanting of wanting that agreement of reducing that and not hiding behind carbon emissions. I mean, carbon credits, because in a lot of discussions amongst non-profit institutions that are going for carbon credit, people are talking, what are you going to do when your carbon credits are bought by the petroleum companies? What happens then? So for me, I mean, in many ways, the choices that we make are also very deeply linked to that. I think those of us who are not part of the formal arrangement, we need to understand. We need to come here to understand the political and the institutional dynamics that touch the work that we do. And I think the very important role that we play is that we take this back to our constituencies and understand that. And so for me, the next week is very interesting because a lot of hidden negotiations are going to happen, and we don't know who's going to tell us all about it. Thank you, so you like that, I mean, from this side? From my side, this cop will not be a success without stronger action on adaptation. We've seen really significant step forwards with loss and damage. I mean, absolutely need to celebrate that, but that cannot come at the cost of lower action on adaptation. So we need to see much more finance. I think there was somewhere between 130 and 160 million committed for adaptation, which is welcome, but of course, nowhere near the volume is needed. So we need to see that addressed. We also need to make sure the quality of that finance is really good. It's getting to the places it needed. It's designed by those who need the finance the most as well. And this is where things are important processes like the principles for locally led adaptation come into it, which of course, many organizations here are endorsers of. We also need to see much, much stronger featuring of things like nature, urban issues in the text itself to really take that cross-sectoral approach. And above all, we just need much stronger accountability across the system. I think with stronger accountability, you really start to see a transformation in the system as well. Thank you. Thank you for the snapshot. If you'd like to know more, you know who to call now over tea or lunch. Thank you so much, Ebony Sheena Megan. And let's give them a round of applause. It's now my pleasure to hand over to my colleague Selby from FIO to give us an idea of the three thematic areas that will carry us through the day and to give us some guidance on what we are expecting. Selby, over to you.  I'm Sylvie Webbs. I'm part of the UN family with the Food and Agriculture Organization. We've been partnering with the NC days for quite some years. We're really very happy to have the NC days going back again with Tracy, with being our champion, taking this forward. It's fantastic. And we've been really putting in very nice connection hearing the VIP speakers putting a center on accountability and transparency. And it's really the just transition is fundamental for everyone, especially for people on the front line. And so we've decided in the preparation for this special day to go on three scenes. And we'd like to hear the thematic leaders. We've organized a bit differently this year in having less session because everything is in one day, but connecting, trying to connect this session, which is not easy because we all each go about organizing a session. And then we can forget about the hooks and the synergies conversion, the conversions in the conversation with the other sessions. I think this year we're having these three person who, three person which are going to come with us and introduce these three themes of the three sessions that we will have after this plenary. The first one is decolonizing climate finance, which is led by the world time. And this is Jana and Hope that is going to introduce us to this session. Jana, thank you for coming. The team leads can join me here already on stage. There's that. That would be nice. We can hear about the session. The second theme lead is strengthening equitable climate partnership. My ID and we have our leader Tracy with us. That's been shaping the entire BNC day actually. And the third theme that's going to be treated more in that other session is accountability for implementation of the Paris goal. Quite an ambitious session. And we have Emily Beauchamp from IISD who's going to introduce us when I'm still looking in the room, so I think if I can ask you, thank you, thank you. This is working, yeah, okay, great. Thank you so much. And it's great to see everyone. Good morning to everyone here. First of all, just before to start talking about the theme of decolonizing climate finance, just thanks to everyone for bringing us together this morning to remember again why we're all here.  And also second of all, I want to thank you all for making us sit down because it's been crazy walking for the last week. So my feet are going to be very happy today. So I'm very, very thankful for this. My name is Jahan Al-Had. I'm the Global Lead for Social Dimensions of Climate Change at the World Bank. And I'm here supposedly to make you very excited to join our sessions, the three sessions on decolonizing climate finance. But I think there are two main reasons why I think it's a must for you to attend our session. The first reason is because the World Bank is organizing three sessions on decolonizing climate finance. So I think it's key and I encourage you to come and help us think about how we can actually move towards this goal. And the second reason is because this is actually the topic that we've all been discussing not only during this topic for the longest time and we really need your thoughts and your guidance to help us really think more concretely what should be our next steps. We tried in all the three sessions to make sure to connect to the other two themes so that you'll see a lot of intersectionality. In our first session to A, you will hear a lot about what we can do to increase financing for local climate action for resilience and adaptation. So please join us because you will hear various perspectives on that and you'll also have some chocolate. So why not? And the second session, which will be 3A, you'll hear about the role of partnerships. And unfortunately, we will not have chocolate for that one but maybe I can get you some dessert. We'll see what I can steal from where and like redistribute resources for better partnerships. And for our third session, which will be 4A, which is guess what was gonna be on? Anyone, any guesses? No? Okay. We're gonna start talking about concrete examples. Finally. So we will start talking about what are some of the pilots? What are we learning right now from some of the implementation on local climate action? And we will think together about how to take some of these lessons learned and really bring them to impact climate climate. So please come to our sessions. We are really looking forward to learning from you. We are learning to engage in more dialogue with you. Keep it informal, keep it handed. Can't wait to be with you in all the three sessions, thanks. Thanks for asking me because part of my pitch is that equitable finance and partnerships are great but they actually don't mean much if you don't have the accountability to build on it.  And usually it's not something that's talked that much about. My name is Emily Beauchamp. I'm the lead for monitoring, evaluation and learning for climate change adaptation at IISD. It rarely makes the punchy titles and often it is just forgotten. But I'm delighted that Megan, Sheila and Ebony really talked about accountability. So I'm gonna try to keep this really short but accountability is really key because imagine trying to bake a cake where different people are bringing critical ingredients in the recipe but the ingredients you're not measured. So you may end up with a pancake but you also may end up with a rock. So you can't really just take these guesses when it comes to building good solutions to climate change. And accountability is about measuring up actually quite literally but it's also about assessing if the cake was good and learning how to do it better in the future. So accountability is really about the cement that holds together the different parts of collective action that we're building to the climate crisis. And it makes sure that things don't fall apart, that finance is continuing, that partnerships are based on trust and transparency and that the different materials are brought together. The Paris Agreement in 2015 is a beacon of hope. It's not just a fancy piece of paper. It's really, as Celine mentioned, it's not, we have to take it not for the piece of paper for the text that it is but rather as collective promise to keep the planet livable for the future generations. So actually accountability, I invite you to think about it not just as a responsibility but as a privilege. And it's kind of a chance to be the hero of your own story. So we all have to be heroes of our own stories and that's why you need all stakeholders and that the job of not saying actors and other actors is really important in coming together. So on the background of this talk, as we've just heard, we have two of the big transparency processes that are really letting us down and that's why our work today is really important. Our three sessions today are also highly collaborative and you'll see that we aim to tell the story from different perspectives, from different sectors and from different scales. So we really aim to have the whole world accountability sold together in one day and that's why we really need your help and we're really looking forward to having our sessions. I'm just gonna finish because if I think 10 times bolder we really need and we really want you to join our sessions because we need all of you to think how we can tackle the climate crisis but that really means challenging racism, capitalism and the patriarchy. And also to have fun today, thank you. After these two pitches I think I don't know if I'll succeed but I'll try. So I am coordinating the theme on equitable partnerships, climate partnerships and from a background that inequality has shaped the way we are focusing on climate action and that's why we are not progressing. There's power displayed by those that have more resources than others. I think I hope everybody's chasing somebody with the money. There are those relationships but there's also systemic injustice whereby we think we know more in the global note than those in the villages or somewhere else when they have the knowledge. We are talking about LNA and other processes but where are the people in the room that are really impacted that are driving these processes? Those are the questions we need to ask. We talk about inclusion. We see youth voices in the cops and everywhere. Who is actually listening to them? Some of them will bring them just to see that the youth are there, take the box but in actual sense we're not doing anything meaningful with them. So, but the worst part of it, I had my slight play, I don't know where it went. The main, main piece of my campaign for everybody to come to the partnership sessions is the failure to acknowledge the power dynamics. That's the biggest elephant in the room. We just scratch things on the surface. We pretend everything is equal is okay. Nobody's actually talking about the dynamics that we don't see and that's why everything is not working. So that's why this space is for us people to name what cannot be named and what will fail to name over the years. Accountability will be there but what does it mean for the donor? All the person receiving the money is equal? Question mark. The colonising climate finance is about being honest, having the trust and having meaningful partnerships. If that doesn't happen, we'll still talk about it but nothing will happen. So we have very exciting sessions, three of them. Climate Justice Residence Fund and ICAT and IISD. I want to be talking about how people create, you know. They're talking about reimagining the process of partnerships through cooperation and they are focusing on loss and damage which is the biggest issue at this call. So how do we create conversations around loss and damage to make sure that they are meaningful for the local community? So those are the really pertinent issues at this call. We have Red Cross Request Center and Special Hub. For those who have joined our CC sessions, you know how much burn they are but in a right. If you miss those ones, then you've not come to the answer base. They are talking about partnerships in a fun way, asking the hard questions, asking what needs to be done through role plays and fun. So be there and see what is happening. They're with 39 burn program. And our other session is with the Adaptation Research Alliance, IID and South, South North. There's a lot of coherence in our sessions. They're also talking about cooperation around urban resilience. What kind of tools, what kind of partnerships we've had conversation of global south. They are breaking that sail over there. So don't miss the session. We have three of you. Three scenes, nine sessions. Three sessions running at the same time. One for team. Going to be very challenging. But yeah, I hope you make the right choice. I think we need to stick to one session once you make your choice not to fly around too much. If that can be possible. I cannot say that. I cannot say that. No, you make your choice. I'll pass. Yes, yes, I'll pass this door to Bettina. Thank you for that question. Let me pick it up right there. And thank you for taking the action. The question was for those who are online. How do we know what's happening in the sessions? I hear some fear of missing out there. For sure we have to navigate this. In each session there'll be a repertoire and the repertoire's will actually then coalesce with the team leads. You have the amazing and quite challenging task to really see what comes out of the sessions and then in the closing plenary at 5.30 this afternoon we'll provide a snapshot in the synthesis of what was discussed in the different sessions on the themes. We'll also take it forward to really make sure that what we are discussing here, what emerges today really has a bigger platform out there and hopefully inspires all of us to make action. So maybe just to take you through the day we are now running a little late but I would say how about we adapt. We're all now good at walking fast I think and take tea or coffee on your way to the side event or to the parallel session of your choice. I'm already saying side event, I've been there for a week now and yet to the parallel session of your choice session 2A on Decolonizing Climate Finance Theme is going to be an aquamarine on the first floor. Session 2B on Partnerships will be an opal on the first floor and the third one on Accountability will be here in the ballroom starting at 11. So just a couple of minutes, we might be a little bit late but I would really like to urge the session host to close on time. Maybe you can be gracious and catch up a little bit. So we'll join here at lunch at round about 12.30 and a quarter to two. We're going back into parallel sessions and then come back here at 5.30 for the closing, plenary and the evening reception thereafter. So it's a self-organized day, three sets of parallel sessions. There is the program outside that you can see you can also use the QR code and have it on your mobile device if you would like and please feel free to navigate the sessions as you would like, be candid in the conversations and have fantastic network opportunities and hopefully inspiring conversations as you go along. Just an announcement on coms, please do tweet that key message is coming out. We have a hashtag there so that we're able to read what is coming out of different sessions. Thank you. Are you ready? Let's go. Next to the list of the four teams who have been waiting for this so much that you could put more on nature and other well-being. Let's spend more time here. I'm going to leave this to you. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. It's a recommendation. She's like moving the pieces and might happen that this action doesn't work. We can't like ate it all. Yeah. Right there.