Christiana Figueres: 2012 Barbara Ward Lecture on an 'energy revolution' (1 Birdcage Walk, London)

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, delivered the fourth Barbara Ward Lecture at 1 Birdcage Walk, London, in March 2012.

The speech begins: While it gives me great pleasure to deliver this year’s Barbara Ward lecture at the IIED, I will frankly admit that it is daunting to participate in a lecture series named after what Time Magazine called one of the most influential visionaries of the 20th century. This visionary woman once said: “We live in an epoch in which the solid ground of our preconceived ideas shakes daily under our certain feet.” Already in the 1970s, Barbara knew that ‘business-as-usual’ no longer represented ‘solid ground’. Always ahead of her time, she knew that we have to combine our immediate commitment to meeting human needs with our longer term need to protect the Earth as a place suitable for human life now and in the future...