Event – Ecocity World Summit 2017

This event will take place on July 12 – 14, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. The ECOCITY World Summit addresses the way humanity builds its home — its cities, towns, and villages.

The series focuses on key actions cities and citizens can take to rebuild our human habitat in balance with living systems, and, in the process, slow down and even reverse global heating, biodiversity collapse, loss of wilderness habitat, agricultural lands, and open space, and social and environmental injustices.

The ECOCITY World Summit 2017 will focus on Changing Cities: Resilience and Transformations, highlighting the need to deploy expert knowledge – academic, professional, civic – to make cities resilient in the face of rapid change. Melbourne has been lauded as the world’s most liveable city but is not immune to the challenges facing all cities. The ECOCITY World Summit 2017 will harness the expertise and develop the networks needed to create a world of ecocities.

Former US Vice President and current Chair of The Climate Reality Project Al Gore to be Principal Speaker at Ecocity World Summit 2017. Mr. Gore will deliver his famous slide presentation including his insights on the role of cities in meeting the global climate challenge. The involvement of Mr. Gore will further strengthen the potential for the Melbourne Ecocity World Summit to play a crucial role in accelerating global climate change action by cities and subnational governments.

This world-renown series was first held in Berkeley California in 1990 and has since been hosted by cities in Australia, Senegal, Brazil, China, India, California, Turkey, Canada, and France. Past conferences have featured a wide range of leaders and innovators, including environmentalist David Brower, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Rusong Wang, member of the Chinese Peoples Congress and Head of the Environmental Sciences division of the Chinese Academy of Science, renowned architect and urban planner Jamie Lerner, former Mayor of Curitia, Brazil, architect/philosopher Paolo Soleri, former Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom, and Denis Hayes, Director of the original National Earth Day in 1970 and keynote for the first ECOCITY Conference.

The ECOCITY World Summit aims to unite people through a new way of living on the planet that provides the best possible cities while enhancing, not destroying, the biosphere. Humanity has entered its urban age, with a rapidly growing majority of the population now living in cities. The ‘urban globe’ faces unprecedented social and environmental challenges. The chief danger is climate change, which threatens epic disruption and hardship. But there are related challenges to human health, biodiversity and the bedrocks of life – food, water, and energy. At the same time, new ‘smart’ technologies are proposing solutions to planetary problems. One principal solution is apparent: our cities must become ecological cities if we want a sustainable world. Creating ecocities must now be a human priority. Australia, a nation of cities, is well-placed to contribute to this urgent global project.

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