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. [17]
Rivett-Carnac was awarded an Honorary PhD from Knox College, Illinois in 2021. [18]
He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to tackling climate change. [19]
Dame Jane Morris Goodall, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviours amongst chimpanzees, including armed conflict.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a tech conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. It has been held annually since 1990. TED covers almost all topics – from science to business to global issues – in more than 100 languages. To date, more than 13,000 TEDx events have been held in at least 150 countries.
Ted Halstead was an American author, policy entrepreneur, and public speaker who founded four non-profit think tanks and advocacy organizations: the Climate Leadership Council, Americans for Carbon Dividends, New America, and Redefining Progress. His areas of expertise included climate policy, economic policy, environmental policy, healthcare, and political reform.
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.
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).
David S. Reay is a climate change scientist, author, and professor of carbon management and education at the University of Edinburgh. He serves as executive director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute and policy director of ClimateXChange.
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 historical 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, the world gains the significant climate benefits of not releasing carbon into the atmosphere. In addition, avoiding deforestation also allows forests to sequester carbon and scrub the air of pollutants. Beyond protecting our air quality, tropical forests create the conditions for rain, recharge our water sources, provide habitats for myriad plant and animal species, and support a way of life for 1.6 billion forest dependent people. 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.
Jane Burston is the Executive Director and Founder of the Clean Air Fund, a philanthropic foundation tackling global air pollution that was launched at the UN Secretary General's Climate Summit in New York with $50m from 6 core funders. Previously, Jane was the Head of Energy and the Environment at the National Physical Laboratory.
Thomas Ward Crowther is a professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and co-chair of the advisory board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. At ETH Zürich, 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 provides ecological data, connectivity, and transparency to conservation and restoration projects around the world. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named Crowther a Young Global Leader.
Eco-anxiety has been defined as "a chronic fear of environmental doom". Extensive studies had been done on ecological anxiety since 2007, and various definitions remain in use. Another widely cited definition is: "the generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse." Some scholars use the term "eco-anxiety" as a synonym for "climate-anxiety", while others like to treat the terms separately. While much ecological disruption results from climate change, some is caused by direct human activity, such as deforestation. The condition is not a medical diagnosis and is regarded as a rational response to the reality of climate change; however, severe instances can have a mental health impact if left without alleviation.
Climate communication or climate change communication is a field of environmental communication and science communication focused on the causes, nature and effects of anthropogenic climate change.
The psychological impacts of climate change on the Earth's inhabitants include emotional states such as eco-anxiety, ecological grief and eco-anger. While unpleasant, such emotions are often not harmful, and can be rational responses to the degradation of the natural world, motivating adaptive action. Other effects of climate change on mental health, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), can be more dangerous. In the 21st century, academics, medical professionals and various other actors are seeking to understand these impacts, to assist in their relief, make more accurate predictions, and to assist efforts to mitigate and adapt to global warming.
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 are 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 awarded to 5 winners each year for their contributions to environmentalism. It was first awarded in 2021 and is planned to run 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 'the restoration and protection of nature', 'air cleanliness', 'ocean revival', 'waste-free living', and 'climate action'.
Climate Live is a series of international concerts hosted every year in over 40+ countries. The concert series was developed by Fridays for Future organisers. Climate Live launched on April 24 with performances by notable artists including Declan McKenna, Milky Chance, Helen Sjöholm, Lia Pappas-Kemps, Lina Mirai, and Oscar Stembridge, as well as supporting messages from Any Gabrielly and Gretchen.
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). 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.
