Governments around the southern Red Sea and the Horn of Africa face a common set of environmental pressures — climate change, waste, degraded marine ecosystems, and environment-linked disease — with no regional forum in which to compare evidence or coordinate a position ahead of the December 2015 UN Climate Conference.
Perim Associates conceived the 2015 East Africa Environmental Risk & Opportunities (“ERO”) Summit and built it from scratch. We secured the patronage of the President of the Republic of Djibouti, H.E. Ismail Omar Guelleh, raised initial funding, and organized the event with Le Centre d’Étude et de Recherche de Djibouti, the University of Djibouti, and the Djibouti Chamber of Commerce. We helped recruit the institutional participants — IGAD, UNECA, the World Bank, OPIC, IRD, the Horn of Africa Regional Environmental Centre, and the Saudi Fund for Development — and the academic partners: Yale, UCSF, UC Berkeley, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts. Corporate sponsors included DP World, Horizon Terminals, Coca-Cola, Turkish Airlines, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, and G4S. We set the agenda and its four working themes: climate change, waste transformation, marine ecosystems, and environment-linked health.
The summit ran May 2–4, 2015 in Djibouti City and drew ministers, private-sector leaders, and development experts from more than 16 countries and four continents. Three initiatives came out of it: a regional Climate and Environmental Observatory under IGAD; the East Africa & Arabia Climate Impact Assessment Task-force, led by Yale, to produce the first high-resolution climate impact model of the region; and a regional acute-care and screening corridor backed by UCSF Global Health and the African Federation for Emergency Medicine, pairing hub-and-spoke emergency clinics with environmental and pandemic monitoring. President Guelleh hosted the Yale delegation, led by Mark Pagani of the Yale Climate & Energy Institute, alongside climate scientists from the other participating universities.
We design — collaboratively, with our partners — the substance of a convening: the themes, the proceedings, the partners, and the specialists who speak, and carry it through to delivery.