Christiana Figueres and Ross Garnaut at the Wheeler Centre

Christiana Figueres, the architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, sees the 2020s as a critical moment of opportunity – the ‘golden decade’ – in the future of our species and our planet. 

Earlier this year, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said: ‘If we do the right thing this decade, we can continue to design the future but if we don’t, we are really condemned to a world of increasing destruction, conflict and pain ... It is a golden ten years in the history of humankind.’

In this episode, Figueres is joined by distinguished Australian climate economist Ross Garnaut. With his new book, Superpower, about energy economics in Australia, Garnaut brings a message of optimism, opportunity and urgency, too. ‘We have unparalleled renewable energy resources,’ he has written. ‘We also have the necessary scientific skills.’

After the chaos and failure of the Copenhagen talks in 2009, Figueres spearheaded a historic agreement of 196 nations at Paris – an achievement few believed was possible. Garnaut has been a household name in Australia since his prescient report on the economics of climate change to the Commonwealth Parliament in 2008.  

Hear these two peerless heavyweights in conversation as they discuss reasons for hope and roadmaps for change, with host Andrew Wear.

Looking for an Auslan-interpreted version? Check out the video.

Sonia Nair and Kamila Shamsie at the Wheeler Centre

With her seventh novel, Home Fire, Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie has pulled off an improbable feat.

Home Fire is a work of great ambition (it's a rigorously researched story of global terrorism, drawing its structure from Sophocles' Antigone) and it's also a gripping page-turner. It's a stinging, and often funny, indictment on our facile political debates about terror, security and religious extremism. And it calls on us to recognise the humanity of both the powerless and the powerful in its story of citizenship and conflicting loyalties. The book's cast of characters includes an Islamic State media recruit, his twin sister and a British Home Secretary.

Home Fire won the 2018 Women's Prize for Literature in the UK and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Shamsie has twice won the prestigious Patras Bokhari Award in Pakistan for previous novels. Her body of work is characterised by in-depth research, and a preoccupation with the ways in which political events impact on individual identities and family ties.

In conversation with Sonia Nair at the Wheeler Centre, the ingenious Shamsie talks global faultlines and torn loyalties.