Description
TLC Zoom
Wednesday 22nd May 2024 @ 18:00 BST
Climate Change: Politics and Diplomacy
John Ashton CBE
Climate change is affecting us all and a subject that is high on our agenda. John’s background, knowledge and experience on the subject is peerless.
John is an independent speaker and writer, with a background in the politics and diplomacy of climate change.
He served as the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change from 2006-12, under Margaret Beckett, David Miliband, and William Hague. His primary role was to help them lay the foundation for a foreign policy-led approach to climate change. This sought to mobilise the UK’s diplomatic resources as a whole, focussing not merely on downstream multilateral negotiations but on shaping the political conditions within which all negotiations take place, so as to raise the overall ambition of the global response to climate change.
John was a cofounder and from 2004-6 the first Chief Executive of the think tank E3G https://www.e3g.org
(E3G stands for Third Generation Environmentalism. The idea behind the name is that the first generation of environmentalists focused on the conservation of species and habitats, the second generation widened the scope to include pollution and natural resources and the third generation is building on this success, working on solutions rather than problems)
From 1978-2002, after a brief period as a research astronomer, he was a career diplomat. He served in Beijing in the early 1980s and in Hong Kong, under Governor Chris Patten, in the runup to the handover of sovereignty. He speaks Chinese and China has been a recurrent theme in his career.
In recent years John has detached himself from institutional affiliations, so as to be able to speak from a position of independence. He has been a full time carer for his late mother; a voice in the opposition to fracking for shale gas and the opening of new coal mines in the UK; and has written on a range of topics including Ukraine (with Kim Darroch), and the plight of the Uyghurs in China (with Caroline Lucas).
John is married with one son. He recently moved from Kew to Newcastle upon Tyne.
