‘Generous. Kind. Funny. Creative. Loving’
By the Climate Centre
I never met anyone so full of life and enthusiasm … Pablo reminded me to always keep and fuel my child-like curiosity and excitement for the world … He was such a joy to work with, whether on game-playing on climate change, or more recently on the power of humour. He LIVED outside the box … Always a delight, whether at Climate Centre events, applied improvisation gatherings, acrobatics in a park or at home in Boston … A legacy of love. A legacy of hugs … I marvel at how this remarkable man still continues to connect us, building community and bringing out the best in humanity … He was incredibly smart but equally kind. A rare quality in today’s world … We have lost a giant … Pablo amaba el lenguaje del corazón y del mundo y era de todas partes … He is a singular human being that no game, sculpture, trapeze artist, or cartoon can represent … Generous. Kind. Funny. Creative. Loving … The man who reminded me that failure is a good sign of progress … His unique way of thinking and commitment to inclusivity will undoubtedly continue to inspire us.
JUST A FEW of the tributes that poured in from all over the world in the WhatsApp group quickly set up in response to the loss of Pablo Suarez, who has died in hospital in Boston at the age of 53 after suffering a brain haemorrhage.
He was taken ill last week during a work call and airlifted to Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, but he never regained consciousness and his final phase on Tuesday was confirmed by his wife and Climate Centre colleague, Janot Mendler de Suarez, who was at his bedside with family and friends.
Pablo was most recently Innovation Lead at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, which he first connected with in 2004, two years after it was established in the Netherlands; as such, he was nearly its longest-serving team member.
Pablo followed a huge range of interests and specialisms including geoengineering, but mainly centred on what he himself described, with considerable understatement, as “creative approaches to risk management” – in reality, a wholly unique approach that won the admiration of many thousands of people over the years; and will continue to as his legacy is preserved in the hearts, minds and working lives of people who knew and loved him.
Together with Janot, Pablo pioneered the use in the humanitarian sector of, above all, games, as well as art, sculpture, cartoons, music, virtual reality and, most recently, acrobatics; none of them innovative in themselves perhaps – all-but revolutionary in a sector well-known for the “arid” (his word) nature of some of its conferences and workshops.
In an early video interview, Pablo explained that after the humbling field experience of unsuccessfully trying to hold the attention of busy Mozambican farmers, he realized that “speaking climate science can be confusing and boring” – the solution, he saw, lay in recognizing the “need to communicate, to connect at the human level first”.
This he did – over two decades of Climate Centre engagement – more profoundly, more compellingly, more movingly than anyone else.
Climate Centre Director of Programmes Julie Arrighi, who knew Pablo for 15 years, says: “Pablo was a visionary and an activator. He championed innovative engagements to communicate and help people understand risk from different angles, including serious games, acrobatics, cartoons, art.
“His early work on a game called Paying for Predictions, for example, helped to catalyse the rapid adoption and spread of anticipatory action in the humanitarian sector.”
This has evolved to the point where the IFRC is now developing early action protocols – which have their genesis in the forecast-based financing model Pablo contributed so significantly to – in no fewer than 75 countries.
In a 2017 article for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Pablo wrote: “Whether virtual or involving face-to-face interaction, games that capture the essence of real-world systems allow for safe and rich explorations of how those systems could be changed.
“They compress space and time, and offer an embodied experience of the tensions that dominate global governance challenges – ‘now versus later’, ‘certainly versus probably’, ‘me versus us versus them’.”
Pablo liked to quote Einstein: “Play is the highest form of research”. This is an insight into which his close Climate Centre colleague, Margot Curl, was very happy to be inducted.
“The first time I met Pablo in 2011 at a beach tent in The Hague where he was hosting a humanitarian games workshop – I was in absolute awe,” she says.
“I wrote down the steps he took and later presented them to the whole conference. Little did I know this would be my interview for a job at the Climate Centre years later when I had the great privilege of becoming Pablo’s colleague and friend.
“This is how Pablo worked and lived: planting seeds of positivity, often not knowing which would grow, but pouring boundless energy into exploration while creating connections everywhere, looking for radical transformation to create a better world wherever he could.
“He certainly changed my life.”
Games that he developed for the IFRC or National Societies, either single-handedly or with collaborators like the New York-based Parsons School for Design, include (with abbreviated titles) Shaping your Shelter, UpRiver, Future Fit, Memory Strings, Dodging the Storm, Dwelling near the Ditch, Weather or Not? and Before the Storm.
Arrighi adds: “Pablo was also warm, inclusive, and deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of climate innovators and leaders, especially those with ‘fire in the belly’.
“The outpouring of tributes from around the world include countless people who met Pablo as students or early-career professionals, for whom his influence and sharp insights shaped the trajectory of their careers – myself included.”
NOT ONLY WAS Pablo innovative, he was also prolific, and that quality manifested itself across all his activities. His CV lists 25 agencies he worked with as well as the Climate Centre; 12 distinct research projects with different academic institutions; more than 30 journal articles; two books and five book chapters; 40 other publications; more than 40 games; nearly 40 films, long and short; and more.
IFRC Under Secretary General Xavier Castellanos agrees that Pablo’s “wisdom, creativity and sense of humour” was unique: “I celebrate his contributions to the humanitarian, academic and scientific communities … Let’s remember a great human being with happiness.”
In the wider Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, Pablo lectured on “humanitarian work in a changing climate” in seminars at nearly 40 National Societies and at least five IFRC regional offices.
But all of it was part of a larger effort to generate what he called “Aha! moments” – the light-bulb epiphanies that connect knowledge to action in the interests of better addressing the impacts of climate change.
One of many occasions when Pablo nudged people out of their comfort zones into areas “where the magic happens” (as he put it) came in 2016 when participants at a Business for Social Responsibility conference in New York were “invited to taste the change”.
On stage, fragrant crostinis sizzled away as Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam added finishing touches to a range of mystery dishes as the session got underway. The audience was intrigued.
In the build-up to the main event, Pablo stepped in to show ways in which protein from insects is radically more beneficial for the environment – and ethical – than more familiar forms of animal protein, presenting an interactive game to demonstrate that a staggering 22,000 litres of water is required to produce a half a kilo of beef, against the single litre needed for the same weight of edible insects. (Yes, edible.)
“The audience began to put two and two together,” the Climate Centre’s Rebeka Ryvola recalls, “and several brave people came forward onto Pierre’s stage kitchen.
“Looks of delight as they bit into their first insect crostini quickly generated a ‘fear of missing out’ through the audience. Soon the stage was packed and in no time at all, the insect smorgasbord was gone.
“In that short session, designed and presented by Pablo and Pierre, the hearts and minds of the audience were shifted. They had – many for the first time – stepped away from their socially taught aversion to eating insects and towards a world of sustainable protein.”
Pablo’s virtual reality project put goggle-wearing players in the disaster driving seat at COP 22 in Morocco, based on three years’ worth of real-life hydrological data from the small flood-prone country of Togo.
It let them decide whether or not to ring an alarm bell, stamp papers for aid delivery, and load supplies into a relief truck – all from a virtual hill overlooking a green valley and the surging waters of a dam.
“The experience aims to help users get a sense of how hard decision-making can be – and suggests how creating better prediction models and pre-authorizing aid might save money, time and lives,” Laurie Goering of the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported then.
By the time of the Marrakech COP, Goering had actually known Pablo for six years. Looking back now, “I was wowed,” she says, “like so many other people were by him, by this warm person who could really communicate with humour and fun and creativity and change things as a result.”
For her there were “many years of writing about, conspiring with and just admiring Pablo, for his huge energy and authenticity and generosity and warmth. He felt things so keenly – the need to act on this huge problem we all face, the hope that we could do it, the despair when far too little happened.
“I have rarely met someone who really engaged with all of it, good and bad, with such unflinching honesty and self-reflection.”
Most recently, Pablo was continuing to pursue the unconventional use of cartoons, “lightly capturing absurdities, tensions and dangers pertaining to serious matters, we showed humour can reframe thinking, uncover difficult truths, and inspire new ideas,” as he explained it.
“We [also] developed and built on acrobatics and juggling that can be utilized in presentations, workshops and policy forums. Examples include our performances and workshops at the Global Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Action and at the Boston Museum of Science with the Circocan International School of Circus from Brazil.” The list went on.
Another colleague who worked closely with Pablo on games and activities for Development and Climate Days especially was Carina Bachofen: “Pablo would always say, ‘It is in the very nature of probability that the improbable will happen.’ How these words ring true now, though this time I don’t want to believe them.
His gift lay in imagining alternative futures and inspiring, inviting – even daring – us to join him in creating and pursuing them.“
ALTHOUGH HE LIVED in the US for much of his life, Pablo Suarez never lost touch with his native Argentina, where he was born in the city of La Plata near Buenos Aires on 21 November 1970 to a family of Italian heritage.
Pablo listed his first language as Spanish but Italian as his “mother tongue”; working knowledge of French and Portuguese helped him connect with many more people, in Africa especially.
In La Plata, for example, he edited or directed the literary journal La Roca and the cultural publication Moebius in the mid-1990s.
A self-confessed “maths geek”, Pablo taught calculus and analytical geometry (among other things) to “unsuspecting subjects” after his first degrees in water and civil engineering at Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de La Plata – the start of an academic career that took him to a master’s in community planning at the University of Southern Maine in 1999 and a PhD in geography at Boston University in 2005.
Appropriately enough – and through what was to emerge as an actual talent for serendipity – it was at COP 10 in Buenos Aires in 2004 that Pablo took the first step in a professional relationship that would last for the rest of his life.
That year saw the third incarnation of what became the Development and Climate Days weekend, attended in 2004 by a small Red Cross delegation that included Climate Centre founder and then director, Madeleen Helmer, and a delegate from each from the Nicaraguan and Vietnamese Red Cross.
She takes up the story. “We were about to leave for dinner when Pablo approached me. His introduction was charming, but we were hungry.
“I looked him in the eye and said, ‘You’re welcome to join me tomorrow morning for a presentation on climate change for the Argentine Red Cross. I’d like to hear what you think about it. Can you be in the lobby at nine?’”
The rest, as they say, is history.
“That was the beginning of a wonderful journey that so fundamentally helped to shape the identity of the Climate Centre,” Helmer remembers now. “We did not know it then, but we touched each other’s souls with our love for playing and humour while we dived deeper into the immense task ahead to address the risks of climate change.”
About almost anyone but Pablo, it might be possible to note that “he was not all work and no play”; for him, of course, the distinction between the two was rarely better than blurred. Defying the very concept of oxymoron, Pablo invented (his words again) “serious fun”.
For what in his case might be called “fun fun”, Pablo played tenor sax in The Al Capone Blues Band, studied flute at Conservatorio Provincial Gilardo Gilardi, and sang with various choirs: the Saengerfest, the Agrupación Coral Antares, and the Coro Juvenil de la Universidad de La Plata, performing – where else? – at Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and Boston’s Fenway Park.
“Pablo touched all our lives in incredible ways and his passing will leave a void that will be impossible to fill,” says Climate Centre Director Aditya Bahadur.
“We will continue to work towards realising Pablo’s vision of deploying innovative and effective approaches for ensuring that the most vulnerable not only survive but flourish despite climate change.”
In accordance with his recorded wishes – and surely in keeping with the way he lived his life – his major organs were donated to patients who need them.
Pablo is survived by his wife Janot Mendler de Suarez, who has helped him champion many “outside the box” endeavours over the years.
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ON A PERSONAL level, Pablo combined a passion for people with immense creativity and tremendous curiosity, also enabled by a traditionally-trained science brain, writes Maarten van Aalst, who was director of the Climate Centre for the bulk of Pablo’s time.
I remember late-night conversations could equally be about forecast-based financing and community-based adaptation, or a new art collaboration to inspire change, or space weather and solar magnetohydrodynamics – my field before I switched to atmospheric physics and chemistry. (Pablo was literally the only person since my student days to knowledgeably quiz me about that, right down to Maxwell’s equations!)
Forecast-based financing and anticipatory action have, of course, been a huge achievement. Just 15 years ago, few people believed humanitarian finance could be reformed to enable systematic anticipatory action.
With an amazing group of colleagues with Pablo at their centre, we helped make it happen, thanks to personal dedication, humanitarian passion, science-based policy, and a constant coupling with practice.
Pablo was in the field when the first pilots happened, such as the FbF project in Togo that also led to many other insights (harnessing serendipity was also part his arsenal, for sure).
His way of transforming conversations in policy contexts was another unique gift – collaborating closely with the late Saleemul Huq, for example, and his vision for Development and Climate Days heralding “an inside-out COP”, the lighter-than-air sculpture with Tomas Saraceno at the 2014 COP in Lima, or more bug-eating sessions at the pivotal Paris COP.
We ran the presidency event on loss and damage at COP 26 in Glasgow, using the “all-caps rant” and cartoons Pablo prepared to enable honest conversations in a highly charged political environment. It would take two more rounds of negotiations to get to an agreement Pablo hoped for in Glasgow that acknowledges a common responsibility, but we got there.
Pablo and I often debated the merits of small steps to change the system versus a more activist approach demanding faster change. Even though he often – perhaps rightly – wanted to go faster, his impact came from his ability to inject his energy, creativity, intellectual brilliance and personal warmth into academic, artistic or activist environments; especially into large, often slow-moving systems such as the humanitarian sector, development finance, and the UNFCC.
Pablo built bridges not just between professional communities but also between climate and development finance, between science, policy and practice, between public and private sectors (with disaster insurance, for example), and between climate risk management and social protection.
It was a great privilege to navigate the journey for the Climate Centre alongside him.
Pablo wows the audience at an Applied Improvisation session in Oxford in 2016. (Photo courtesy Barbara Tint)