Early life
Rivett-Carnac was born in Hammersmith, London, England in November 1977. [1] He is the eldest son of Christopher Charles Rivett-Carnac, a descendant of Sir James Rivett-Carnac, 1st Baronet. His mother, Sara Catherine Hutchinson, a daughter of Dr. R. J. C. Hutchinson, [2] married his father in West Somerset in 1974. [3]
Growing up he travelled widely, living in Indonesia, Tunisia, UAE and Australia and went to Allhallows College at the age of 13. He attended Bath Spa University, graduating BSc in Environment and Economics, and Schumacher College-Plymouth University, where he took a master's degree in Holistic Science [4] and graduated in the same class as Nigel Topping, who went on to become the UK's High Level Champion for Climate Action for COP26.
After graduating, Rivett-Carnac spent three years living as a Buddhist monk [4] in Thailand and Myanmar.
Career
After positions at consultants CarbonSense and engineering firm Dyson, Rivett-Carnac joined CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) in 2006. He was part of the team that set up the original CDP Supply Chain and CDP Cities programs. In 2012 he moved to New York to become President and CEO of CDP North America. [5]
In 2013 he was approached by Christiana Figueres [6] and shortly afterwards moved to Bonn, Germany in the position of Senior Advisor to the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [7] His responsibility was the political strategy towards achieving binding international agreements. He is seen as one of the architects of the Paris Climate Accord of December 2015. [4]
In 2016 Rivett-Carnac left the United Nations together with Christiana Figueres and they co-founded Global Optimism. [8] From that position he advises a wide range of corporations and governments. This includes serving as a co-founder of the Climate Pledge; together with Amazon, and a Fellow at the Bezos Earth Fund. [9] He is also on the Expert Review Panel [10] for the Earthshot Prize. He is a former Senior Fellow at Stanford Law School. [11]
Rivett-Carnac is the co-host of the podcast Outrage and Optimism [12] and co-author of the bestselling book The Future we Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis. [13] His TED Talk has been viewed 3 million times. [14]
During the global lockdown of 2020, Rivett-Carnac wrote a children's book called When We All Stopped, [15] illustrated by his sister, Bee Rivett-Carnac. Ted-Ed made the book into an animation, voiced by Jane Goodall, [16] which has since been viewed more than 1.3 million times. [16]
Rivett-Carnac was awarded an Honorary PhD from Knox College, Illinois in 2021. [17]
He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to tackling climate change. [18]
José María Hipólito Figueres Ferrer served three terms as President of Costa Rica: 1948–1949, 1953–1958 and 1970–1974. During his first term in office he abolished the country's army, nationalized its banking sector, granted women and Afro-Costa Ricans the right to vote, and offered Costa Rican nationality to people of African descent.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. Its main conference has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages.
Alex Steffen is an American futurist and advocate of 'bright green environmentalism' who writes and speaks about sustainability and the future of the planet. He emphasizes the importance of imagining persuasive, positive possible futures: "It's literally true that we can't build what we can't imagine,... The fact that we haven't compellingly imagined a thriving, dynamic, sustainable world is a major reason we don't already live in one."
The politics of climate change results from different perspectives on how to respond to climate change. Global warming is driven largely by the emissions of greenhouse gases due to human economic activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, certain industries like cement and steel production, and land use for agriculture and forestry. Since the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels have provided the main source of energy for economic and technological development. The centrality of fossil fuels and other carbon-intensive industries has resulted in much resistance to climate friendly policy, despite widespread scientific consensus that such policy is necessary.
Solitaire Townsend is a female entrepreneur, sustainability expert, TED speaker and author. She co-founded the change agency Futerra in 2001, now one of the leading sustainability agencies in the world, working with the world’s most influential organisations to activate social justice and environmental restoration.
Christopher Frank William Goodall is an English businessman, author and expert on new energy technologies. He is an alumnus of St Dunstan's College, University of Cambridge, and Harvard Business School (MBA). He was the Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon in the 2024 general election, having run in the same constituency in 2010. He writes Carbon Commentary, a free newsletter on global advances in clean energy. His latest book, Possible: Ways to Net Zero, was published by Profile Books in March 2024.
Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen is a Costa Rican diplomat who has led national, international and multilateral policy negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. During the next six years she worked to rebuild the global climate change negotiating process, leading to the 2015 Paris Agreement, widely recognized as a historic achievement.
Avoided Deforestation Partners, or AD Partners, is a non-profit organization under the auspices of the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. AD Partners is involved in the global effort to solve climate change by working to end deforestation in tropical rainforest countries. By avoiding the practice of deforestation, i.e., clearing forests to provide inexpensive farmland, potential carbon emissions are prevented. In addition, avoiding deforestation also allows forests to sequester carbon and scrub the air of pollutants. Beyond protecting the Earth's air quality, tropical forests facilitate conditions for rain, replenish water sources, provide habitats for myriad plant and animal species, and sustain the livelihoods of 1.6 billion people globally. Leading scientists and economists say that ending deforestation is the most cost effective and scalable method of reducing greenhouse gases. In fact, they believe that ending deforestation will cut the timeframe for solving the climate crisis in half.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP19 or CMP9 was held in Warsaw, Poland from 11 to 23 November 2013. This is the 19th yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 9th session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference delegates continue the negotiations towards a global climate agreement. UNFCCC's Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres and Poland's Minister of the Environment Marcin Korolec led the negotiations.
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The institute is aligned with ecomodernist philosophy. The Institute advocates for an embrace of modernization and technological development in order to address environmental challenges. Proposing urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination as processes with a potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.
Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass filled with water to the halfway point: an optimist is said to see the glass as half full, while a pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
Thomas Ward Crowther is a professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and founding co-chair of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. At ETH Zurich, he started Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scientists exploring the role of biodiversity in regulating the Earth's climate. Crowther is the founder of Restor, an online platform that supports thousands of community-led restoration projects around the world. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named Crowther a Young Global Leader.
Climate communication or climate change communication is a field of environmental communication and science communication focused on discussing the causes, nature and effects of anthropogenic climate change.
The psychological impacts of climate change concerns effects that climate change can have on individuals' mental and emotional well-being. People experience a wide range of emotions as they grapple with the challenge of climate change between their short-term self-interest and their longer-term community interests. People respond to concerns about climate change in various ways: behaviorally, via acts that frequently indicate conflicting attitudes, emotionally, through affective responses, and cognitively, through assessments. There is a wealth of research demonstrating how emotions influence people's decisions in a variety of contexts, including social issues, and can be used to distill personal experiences. They may also relate to more generalized effects on groups and their behaviors, such as the urge to migrate from affected areas of the globe to areas perceived as less affected. These impacts can manifest in various ways and affect people of all ages and backgrounds. Some key psychological impacts of climate change include emotional states such as eco-anxiety, ecological grief, eco-anger or solastalgia. While troublesome, such emotions may not appear immediately harmful and can lead to a rational response to the degradation of the natural world motivating adaptive action.However, there can be other effects on health, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for instance, as a result of witnessing or seeing reports of massive wildfires, which may be more dangerous.
Bina Venkataraman is an American science policy expert, author, and journalist. She is currently a Columnist at The Washington Post. She previously served as the Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe and as a senior advisor for Climate Change Innovation under President Barack Obama's administration. She also advised the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and has taught at MIT and the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction ("cli-fi") novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation's. While they pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential. The plot primarily follows Mary Murphy, the head of the titular Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, an American aid worker traumatized by experiencing a deadly heat wave in India. Many chapters are devoted to other characters' accounts of future events, as well as their ideas about ecology, economics, and other subjects.
The Earthshot Prize is a global environmental award that is rewarded to five winners each year for their contributions towards environmentalism. It was first awarded in 2021 and is planned to be awarded annually until 2030. Each winner receives a grant of £1 million to continue their environmental work. The five categories were inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals; they are 'restoration and protection of nature', 'air cleanliness', 'ocean revival', 'waste-free living' and 'climate action'.
The timeline of international climate politics is a list of events significant to the politics of climate change.
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is a collaboration between the CDP, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), with a global team composed of people from these organisations. Since 2015, more than 1,000 companies have joined the initiative to set a science-based climate target.
The Climate Pledge Fund is a division of Amazon, set up to develop and manage investments in the climate technology space, as part of its Climate Pledge initiative. It is a corporate venture capital fund.
