Festival of Ideas: Mary Robinson (Free)

Mary Robinson
Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
Fri 30 November, 19:00-20:30
Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building
Free, but booking required. Booking opens 09:00 on Mon 15 October.

Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people – people battling for food, water and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal.

Mary Robinson’s mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that the agents of change in the battle for climate justice at grassroots level were women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change. Now she offers a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope.

To ensure we can include as many audience questions as possible on the day, we are collecting them at time of booking.

Events start punctually and, out of consideration to other audience members and speakers, our policy is not to admit latecomers. Please make sure to arrive before the advertised start time to take your seat/s.

We have restricted the number of tickets that can be booked to one per transaction. This has been introduced in an effort to stop people automatically booking multiple tickets without confirming if they have guests to go with them. We hope this will help to limit the number of 'no shows' at the events, which currently run at around 35% of bookings. If you need more than one ticket, you can click on the booking link again. The little extra effort involved will hopefully put off those who don’t really need more than one, but not those who do.

The Festival of Ideas endeavours to hold its events in venues that are accessible to all. The Great Hall in the Wills Memorial Building has a loop system and is accessible to wheelchair users. For more information about accessing the venue, check here. If you have specific access concerns, please do contact us with any questions.

We sometimes film and photograph Festival of Ideas events. Please let us know if you do not wish to be filmed or photographed.

When you book ticket/s you will receive reminder and feedback emails and any urgent notifications about the event. We will not contact you again unless you are subscribed to our newsletter.

Full terms and conditions, including our Privacy Policy, can be found on our website.