Speaker: Cynthia Scharf serves on the UN Secretary-General's Climate Change Support Team and also works for the Secretariat of the UN's High-level Panel on Global Sustainability.
The 2010 UN climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico, were a modest but much-needed step forward in addressing what the UN Secretary-General has called the "defining challenge of our time." Unfortunately, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, with extreme weather and other climate impacts affecting millions of people. Nearly twenty years after the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established in Rio, there remains a yawning gap between what the science tells us is needed to minimize climate risks, and the political response to that challenge.

How can we move beyond the current stalemate as we approach the next UNFCCC meeting at Durban in 2011 and the Rio+20 summit in 2012? What are the underlying values and principles that shape the climate discourse? If science alone fails to persuade, what other arguments and allies are needed to help strengthen a consensus for action? What do young people bring to the discussion? Open to: the general public Sponsor(s): MIT Energy Campus Events