The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, was a seminal moment in the world’s struggle to fight climate change. 197 countries agreed to limit the rise in global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. But Christiana, who led those global climate negotiations as Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, says the climate agreement was just a staging post in what remains a long, hard process. So what are the next steps?
Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican citizen and was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010-2016.
During her tenure at the UNFCCC Ms Figueres brought together national and sub-national governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions and NGOs to jointly deliver the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, in which 197 sovereign nations agreed on a collaborative path forward to limit future global warming to well below 2C. For this achievement Ms Figueres has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy.
Ms. Figueres is a founding partner of Global Optimism Ltd., a purpose driven enterprise focused on social and environmental change. She is currently a member of the The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School; the Convenor of Mission 2020, Vice-Chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, World Bank Climate Leader, ACCIONA Board Member, WRIBoard Member, Fellow of Conservation International, and Advisory Board member of Formula E, Unilever and ENI.
Humanity has lost the battle against climate change. That is what Paul Kingsnorth thinks. The former environmental activist believes that we can’t stop climate change anymore. How should we live on knowing that climate change is a fact that can’t be denied anymore? A documentary that gives thinker and writer Paul Kingsnorth the time to explain how humanity still can be hopeful although the battle against climate change in his eyes has been lost.
Former environmental activist and writer Paul Kingsnorth has withdrawn to Ireland on a unspoilt part of the earth. You could say that he lives now at the end of the world. A portrait of an end-time thinker who nevertheless does not give up hope and continues to believe in the power of nature.
Thinker and writer Paul Kingsnorth stood early on the barricades as a conservationist. He resisted the insatiable hunger of the globalized world for more land, resources and things in England and on the other side of the world in Papa New Guinea. Kingsnorth was one of the leaders of the environmental movement and reached a large international audience with its passionate speeches. But at some point, he came to terms that he had to revisit his belief that humanity could save the world.
In his bundled essays “Confessions of a recovering environmentalist” (2017) he describes how some weak-kneed accountants of this world hollowed out the green movement from the inside and exchanged the barricades for ties and conference tables. Limiting CO2 emissions became the new gospel because it was measurable and countable. But according to Kingsnorth, that is an illusion. He thinks that in his victory rush, the green movement of today exchanges the remaining wild nature for a wind or solar panel farm. The battle is lost.
Kingsnorth withdrew with his family to the Irish countryside to live self-sufficient. He founded the “Dark Mountain Project” in which writers, poets and artists are looking for a different view of the end of the world, based on the connection between man and nature. He exchanged his clenched fist and protesting voice for an inner, literary search for the question of what makes us human and what our place is on this magical planet.
