IIEA Talks

In her address to the IIEA, President Kersti Kaljulaid reflects on Estonia’s Presidency of the UN Security Council in June 2021. She assesses the key achievements of Estonia’s Presidency through the lens of its five core priorities and high-level signature events, including the first ever high-level open debate on cybersecurity. About the Speaker: Her excellency Kersti Kaljulaid was elected as President of the Republic of Estonia in 2016. She previously served as a Member of the European Court of Auditors, advising Prime Minister Mart Laar and holding different top-level positions in energy, investment banking and the telecom sector. A genetic engineer and economist by education, she has been a member of the Supervisory Board of the Estonian Genome Center and the Council Chair of the University of Tartu from 2012 to 2016.

This event is part of the Environmental Resilience lecture series, co-organised by the IIEA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On this occasion, Professor Delbeke argues that sustainable finance has a crucial role to play in delivering on the policy objectives of the European Green Deal, as well as the EU’s international commitments to its climate and sustainability objectives. The European Commission has adopted a package of sustainable finance measures, such as the EU Taxonomy Climate Delegated Act, with the aim of making the Union a global leader in setting standards for sustainable finance. Professor Delbeke reflects on these initiatives and considers how the U.S. may follow suit. He also highlights that the delivery of climate finance to support developing countries will be a key determinant of success at the upcoming UN Climate Summit in Glasgow. Professor Delbeke concludes that the transition to a climate resilient future will depend on the development of a resource-efficient economy with a financial system that supports sustainable growth. About the Speaker: Jos Delbeke is a Professor at the European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance, where he serves as the EUI's European Investment Bank Chair on Climate Change Policy and International Carbon Markets. He is also Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium. From 2010 until 2018, Professor Delbeke was Director-General of the European Commission's DG Climate Action. In this role, he was heavily involved in setting the EU’s climate and energy targets for 2020 and 2030 and was a key player in developing EU legislation on the Emissions Trading System (ETS). Professor Delbeke was previously European Commission's chief negotiator at the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, where he was responsible for the EU's implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and pivotal in the negotiations of the Paris Agreement. As an economist, he underlined the role of market-based instruments and of cost-benefit analysis in the field of the environment.

This seminar takes place in the context of Ireland and Norway’s 2021-22 membership of the UN Security Council. It seeks to provide national, regional and global outlooks that relate to national security, well-being and prosperity. While focusing on the three main institutions for peace and security – UN, EU and NATO – the panel of experts also offer national perspectives. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Defence, Simon Coveney T.D., provides opening remarks at this seminar. The panel includes: Jacqui McCrum, Secretary General of the Department of Defence Ambassador Øystein Bø, Permanent Representative of Norway to NATO Lieutenant General Seán Clancy, Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces Dr Kari M. Osland, Senior Research Fellow for Peace, Conflict and Development at NUPI About the Speakers: Jacqui McCrum joined the Department of Defence as Secretary General in August 2020. Prior to that, she served as Deputy Secretary General in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. Previously, she was the Director General and Accounting Officer in the Office of the Ombudsman, Offices of the Information Commissioner and Commissioner for Environmental Information, among others. Ambassador Øystein Bø was appointed as Norway’s Permanent Representative to NATO in 2018. Previously, he was a Senior Advisor in the Section for Security Policy and North America and served as State Secretary for the Norwegian Ministry of Defence from 2013. Lieutenant General Seán Clancy is the newly appointed Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces. Previously, he served as the Deputy Chief of Staff served in appointments including Squadron Commander, Chief of Air Staff Support in Air Corps Headquarters and Director of the Strategic Planning Branch on the Chief of Defence’s Staff. Dr Kari Osland is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research Group for Peace, Conflict and Development at NUPI. Her work focuses predominancy on conflict dynamics, insurgencies, peace operations and peace building. Dr Osland has provided consultancy work to the UN, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the Norwegian Policy Directorate. She has work experience in the Balkans, Afghanistan and in Africa (Niger, South Sudan, Sudan).

In this event, Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič presents the EU’s vision for the implementation of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland. He also addresses the post-Brexit challenges and opportunities which lie ahead in EU-UK relations in the context of Northern Ireland. About the Speaker: Maroš Šefčovič is Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight. He is responsible for the European Union’s relations with the United Kingdom, co-chairing the EU-UK Partnership Council under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the EU-UK Joint Committee for the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement. He also leads the European Commission’s work on the European Battery Alliance. From 2010-2019, Mr Šefčovič was Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Interinstitutional Relations and Administration and subsequently the Energy Union. Prior to this, he served as Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth. Mr Šefčovič previously served as a member of the Slovak diplomatic corps in Zimbabwe and Canada, as Ambassador to Israel, and as Permanent Representative to the EU. Vice-President Šefčovič holds a PhD in European Law from Comenius University, Bratislava.

According to Professor Chomsky, we live in a unique historical moment, confronted by an array of severe challenges, some so severe that “failure to address them soon will effectively terminate organised human society, with mass destruction of other species as well”. The two most prominent are climate change and nuclear war. Moreover, the current pandemic has killed more Americans than the flu pandemic of a century ago and has not yet run its course. It is also well understood that failure to vaccinate globally is not only a moral scandal but also facilitates mutations that may escape control. Other crises also loom such as the emergence of new pandemics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and land degradation. In his address to the IIEA, Professor Chomsky argues that despite the severe crises that humans face at this historically unprecedented moment, feasible solutions are at hand.  He considers whether humans have the moral and intellectual capacity to choose a course towards a much better world and how we might provide the answers. About the Speaker: Noam Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in Linguistics in 1955 from the University of Pennsylvania. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. The major theoretical viewpoints of his doctoral dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in part in 1975. Professor Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. In 2017, Professor Chomsky was appointed Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona. Professor Chomsky has lectured at many universities in the US and abroad and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards. He has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs, and U.S. foreign policy.

The average rate of labour productivity growth in the 15 nations of Western Europe slowed from five percent per annum in the 1950s and 1960s to less than one percent in the decade ending in 2019. According to Prof. Gordon, the EU-15 performance is catching up to the U.S. in stages, followed by a retardation since 1995. In Prof. Gordon's view, the overall theme is that productivity growth slowdown was due to a retardation in technical change that affected the same industries by roughly the same magnitudes on both sides of the Atlantic. An interpretation will be provided by Prof. Gordon of rapid productivity growth during the pandemic of 2020-21 and the likely trajectory of growth in the 2020s. About the Speaker: Robert J. Gordon is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. He is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth. His recent work on the rise and fall of American economic growth and the widening of the U. S. income distribution have been widely cited, and in 2016 he was named as one of Bloomberg’s top 50 most influential people in the world. Gordon is author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US Standard of Living Since the Civil War (published in January 2016 by the Princeton University Press). He is also author of Macroeconomics, twelfth edition, and of The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, The American Business Cycle, and The Economics of New Goods. Gordon is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In the fifth event of the IIEA’s Development Matters lecture series, which is supported by Irish Aid, Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait – a global fund for education in emergencies - discusses her vision of how to mitigate the impact of both the climate emergency and pandemics on the global education crisis. She focuses her remarks on developments in sub-Saharan Africa where the consequences of climate change are most pronounced and where the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage. Ms Sherif highlights the ways in which Education Cannot Wait is working to ensure young children, especially young girls, can survive and thrive. She outlines how countries like Ireland can help in this endeavour. About the Speaker: Yasmine Sherif is the Director of Education Cannot Wait, a global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crisis, established at the World Humanitarian Summit and hosted by UNICEF. A human rights lawyer with 30 years of experience in international affairs, Ms Sherif joined the United Nations in 1988 and served in New York, Geneva, and in crisis-affected countries in Africa, Asia, Balkans, and the Middle East.

In his address to the IIEA, Fredrik Erixon argues that Europe's quest for digital sovereignty is unrealistic if it requires Europe to cut its dependence on the rest of the world by substituting foreign suppliers with local ones. Instead, Europe's relative economic decline means it will become more dependent on innovation and technological breakthroughs happening outside of the EU. Mr Erixon argues that the EU should improve its autonomous capacity to use and commercialise new digital technology and that Europe should deepen collaboration with the US and other like-minded countries to help shape the global norms and rules guiding digital markets. This is the sixth event in an IIEA project entitled Europe’s Digital Future, which is exploring the topic of ‘digital sovereignty’ in Europe. As part of this project, which is supported by Google, a year-long programme of events and research is exploring what this concept means, and what future it might herald for the EU and for small, open economies like Ireland. Fredrik Erixon has been the Director of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) since it was founded in 2006. He is a Swedish economist and is the author of several books. His research interests include trade, regulatory policy and technological change and Europe’s relations with North America and Asia. The Financial Times has ranked Erixon as one of Brussels’s thirty most influential people.

'The Spirit of Green' is available at the link below https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691214344/the-spirit-of-green In ‘The Spirit of Green’, Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions. In a discussion that ranges from the history of the environmental movement to the Green New Deal, Nordhaus explains how the spirit of green thinking provides a compelling and hopeful perspective on modern life. He shows how rethinking economic efficiency, sustainability, politics, profits, taxes, individual ethics, corporate social responsibility, finance, and more would improve the effectiveness and equity of our society. About the Speaker: William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. His major work focuses on the economics of climate change, developing models that integrated the science, economics, and policies necessary to slow warming. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018 "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis." From 1977 to 1979, Professor Nordhaus served as a Member of President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to 1988, he served as the Provost of Yale University and was President of the American Economic Association from 2015 to 2016. Professor Nordhaus completed his undergraduate work at Yale University in 1963 and received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his address to the IIEA, Joan Marc Simon argues that the EU needs to adopt a multidimensional approach to tackle Europe’s waste problem. He proposes that EU policymakers will need to replace half a century of legislation and economic incentives favouring disposability with a new paradigm in resource management if Europe is to achieve a circular future. Mr Simon argues that Europe needs a socio-economic system that is healthy for people, rebuilds natural capital, and generates local economic activity rooted in the community. To realise this vision, he concludes that coordinated and integrated EU policymaking will be essential to change packaging, chemical, and food policies, and lay the foundations of a circular, healthier, and fairer society. About the Speaker: Joan Marc Simon is the Executive Director of Zero Waste Europe, a Brussels-based NGO that operates as a knowledge network and advocacy group. It works with 400 municipalities in 24 countries, with the mission of redesigning our relationship with resources. Mr Simon is a member of the Steering Committee of the Break Free from Plastic movement. He is the author of many influential articles, such as the ‘Zero Waste Masterplan for Cities’ and several books, including ‘Zero Waste – How to Reactivate the Economy Without Trashing the planet’ and ‘It’s Plastic, Stupid!’. Mr Simon has a background in economics and considerable experience of working with governmental and non-governmental organisations in the field of good governance, new economics, social justice, and the environment.