Prof. Najam Delivers Keynote at South Asia Conference

Prof. Adil Najam, the director of the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future delivered the closing keynote address at the Twelfth Annual Sustainable Development Conference of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad, Pakistan. Prof. Najam’s keynote address looked at the future of South Asia as a region and argued that this future would be defined, amongst other forces, by global climate change challenges.

Delivering the First H.U. Beg Memorial lecture, Prof. Adil Najam said that South Asia plus China will determine the world’s climate future and the future of this region itself will be defined by climate change. He said that it is not just because of demography, but because the region will see the most dramatic growth in emissions and will have the greatest capacity for influencing those changes. He said that unlike the West, in South Asia climate change is not just a problem of emissions; it is a problem of development.

The three day conference was attended  by over 300 people, including a large number of experts from all across South Asia. On the opening day of the conference, the BU Pardee Center had sponsored a panel discussion of ‘The Future of South Asia’ as part of its South Asia 2060 initiative.