Originator of the 15-Minute City Concept · Author of The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time & Our Planet
It all starts at home. As a university professor, I have observed the process of transformation of different generations. We need to find a sense of life. We need to find a sense of belonging to our humanity, but to have this sense of life, we need to find a sense in our local communities.
Director · Center for Environment, Community, & Equity
Author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action
I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. In other words, I do believe there is hope to save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused. However, I also believe that saving ourselves will only be possible with a mass mobilization that is driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. A generalized sense of extreme risk can lead to peaceful and less-peaceful mass mobilizations at the levels needed to stimulate an AnthroShift. Only a global risk event (or numerous smaller events that are seen as threatening social and economic centers of power) will motivate the kind of massive social change that is needed. In other words, without a risk pivot—be it driven by social or environmental change—an AnthroShift that is large enough to respond adequately to the climate crisis and open a large enough window of opportunity postshock is improbable.
Founding Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Host of Climate Connections · Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment
Storytelling is still one of the most powerful ways we have to communicate from one person to another, from one person to millions, and from millions back to one. At the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, we study how people respond to climate change. So what do people around the world understand or misunderstand about the causes, the consequences, and solutions? How do they perceive the risks: the likelihood and severity of different types of impacts from sea level rise to the health impacts? What kinds of policies do they support or oppose? And then what kinds of behaviors are people engaged in or willing to change to be part of climate solutions? There are lots of different things there, but our ultimate question is answering why. What are the psychological, cultural, the political reasons why some people get engaged with this issue? While others are kind of apathetic and some are downright dismissive and hostile, or at least they are in the United States, which thankfully is not the case in most of the rest of the world.
Founder & Executive Director of F Minus
a Research & Advocacy Group Calling for Divestment from Fossil Fuel Lobbyists
Author of the novel The Fracking King
The lobbyists that represent the fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Koch companies, and the American Petroleum Institute, they knew for years that the climate crisis would happen, and they've been telling us that it wouldn't. And right now in every state capital, the lobbyists are doing everything they can to slow the transition from fossil fuel to renewables. The sad fact is, these oil and gas lobbyists will never wake up one morning and say: I am worried about the climate crisis. I'm worried about my children. I am going to cut off ties with these oil and gas companies and stop taking their money. That will never happen. And I'm sad to say this, but it's been a long, long road to try to change their behavior with facts or reason.
Director of the Climate Change Institute at The Australian National University
Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Co-recipient of the 2007 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
We live in a diverse world, and we're in a funny time where we sometimes see the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. And I think what we need to do is be very strong in wanting to lift the game of each other and ourselves. And so I think that's one of the sort of key things. Particularly, young people should be more demanding that we behave better towards each other and care more about each other and the world that we live in. In terms of these heatwaves, droughts, and fires that the world is seeing, which we thought were going to hit us in 2050 or 2070, are hitting us now in 2023. So, those risks are coming much faster and harder than we thought they were going to come. And so, in many cases, we're unprepared for the severity of these changes.
Author of Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action
Environmental Advocate · Educator · Fmr. Director, Maine Department of Marine Resources
Fmr. Deputy Director, State Planning Office
So to me, the connection is just being outdoors. It really brings energy, to my life and it brings energy to my work. And I think for a lot of people, this is true, that nature is kind of the place where they can regenerate their energy. And if people haven't experienced that, I encourage them to try it, because nature can be very restorative. So, absolutely there's a connection between health, the outdoors, and between environmental issues and creating a healthy, clean environment for future generations.
Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center
It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.
Tyler Prize Award-winner for Environmental Achievement
Professor of Environmental Change & Public Health
Fmr. Chair of WHO World Health Report · Rockefeller /Lancet Commission on Planetary Health
In terms of the impacts of climate change on health when we started 30 years ago, because there was very little data then, so we made suggestions as to what we thought the health outcomes we thought would be affected like vector-borne diseases, crop failures, water availability, sea level rise, increasing disasters related to climatic extreme events, and obviously the effects of extreme heat on vulnerable populations. In particular, elderly people, but not just elderly people. So we suggested a whole range of different health impacts that could occur. And I think, in general, those ideas have stood the test of time, but of course, as the situation has moved on, we've also become much more preoccupied with what kind of action we need to take.
Author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
Broadcaster and Researcher Working on Climate Change and Mental Health
I think the general waking up that I'm seeing around me in so many different parts of society, people from all walks understanding that this is here, it's not a future threat. It's active now. We need to get smart about addressing it. A lot of people are also asking themselves how can I be of service? What can I do at this time? How am I going to be? And you know, the more climate job boards and networking communities and sites of bringing people together to do that work of figuring out how they're going to go on their climate journey while infusing it with a sense of joy, with a sense of how can we make this fun, right? How can we reshift so this is not just focusing on the negative, but really focusing on what we want to be building and what is abundant and the better life that we're working towards? All of that has been popping up a lot and that gives me an honest sense of hope. So a lot of it is about that relationality, creating conditions of solidarity that bring a sense of stability and security. Even though there's a lot of uncertainty about what the impacts will be and how they're going to affect us, each and every one of us, in the decades ahead. There needs to, amidst all that uncertainty, be other things that can undergird a child and make them feel held, safe, secure, and like they belong to a protective community that's thinking and feeling with them through this.
Hydrologist, Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security, U of Saskatchewan
Host of the Podcast What About Water?
I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are somewhat loosely related to climate change and they are impacted by climate change. That's sometimes part of the reason why it gets split off because it's thought of as maybe an infrastructure problem, but you know, the changing extremes, the aridification of the West, the increasing frequency, the increasing droughts, these broad global patterns that I've been talking about, that I've been looking at with my research – that's all climate change. Just 100% climate change, a hundred percent human-driven. And so it does need to be elevated in these climate change discussions.
Executive Director & Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health
Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication
Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.
So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.
Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene & We’re Doomed, Now What?
Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative
It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life.
Founding Director of Planetary Health Alliance
Principal Research Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
I think the environmental community has been guilty of a lot of catastrophism, a lot of statements like ‘Game Over for the Planet’, and we’ve painted a lot of very dark pictures about where we’re going, but when you look across these different sectors and all the solutions that are out there, there’s no reason to believe that our grandchildren couldn’t live in an incredibly exciting world.
Author of Water, A Biography
Natural Resource Security & Environmental Sustainability Expert
The problem doesn’t really reside there. The problem is that people have gotten used to thinking about water as a technical issue that can be solved by somebody sitting in a room somewhere with a white coat. The reality is that the history of water shows that this is probably the most political and salient issue of society–How we share the resources that make it possible for us to live is a fundamentally political problem. And in nations that live together under a social contract is fundamentally a constitutional problem. So my hope is that we elevate water to a much higher level of political discourse.
Senior Policy Officer Economic Transition at European Environmental Bureau
Author of Turning Point: The pandemic as an opportunity for change
Now with this crisis even the IMF, even the economists are saying we’re not going to go back to the neoliberal era. And they were defending this era for decades. So, I have hope that maybe we can now transition to something like a Wellbeing Era, where countries are already saying “we want to be a wellbeing economy. New Zealand is telling every ministry: Tell us how you are improving the wellbeing of the New Zealand people. So that means wellbeing has become the cop who rules over the others. There are countries like Bhutan who have thirty years of experience of doing that. They call it Gross National Happiness.
CEO of The Better Meat Co.
Author of Nat’l Bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World
If you go fill up your car with gas in the United States, chances are high that probably about 10% of your gas is not actually coming from fossil fuels. It's coming from ethanol.You don't even contemplate the fact that there's ethanol in your gas. And I think that meat maybe come like that, where people will obtain meat. But the norm will be for that meat not to be totally animal in its nature. And I think that people will just have a different view of what meat is, and it will be far more diverse than what it is today.
Founder and CEO of FullCycle Fund
Is it okay that you benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else? Is that a way that you really feel like you are winning at life? If not, then reconsider what you’re doing and just realize that we all live in this inextricably connected closed sphere in the middle of space. Anything that harms one area harms every area. There is nobody who can escape dirty air, dirty water, dirty food, economic political disruptions, etc. We’re all in this together. So don’t fool yourself by thinking somehow you’re going to come out this unscathed and having ‘won’ while everybody else loses.
Most Influential Living Philosopher
Author · Founder of The Life You Can Save
I would like young people to recognise that they are part of a long tradition that has been trying to the make the world a better place. A tradition that goes back as far as we have recorded history, that there are people who tried to–like Socrates, but also like Buddha and many other figures in different cultures–think more about how we ought to live in accordance with their thinking. Tried to do good in the world and that’s a tradition they can be part of. This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.
Inaugural Director · UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace & Sustainable Development
I’ve always found that science and evidence has to be the guiding force in the way that we design our programs. Of course, understanding people as humans. People as not just rational human beings. That’s another thing that I also learned during my journey is that the whole notion of a rational human being is used as an assumption to make our economic models simple.
