A Decade of Climate Advocacy: From Paris to the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty

From a moratorium on new coal mines to a full blown fossil fuel non proliferation treaty. Kumi Naidoo in conversation with Richard Denniss.

Back in 2015 on the fringes of the Paris COP, Kumi Naidoo (then ED of Greenpeace International) and Richard Denniss, ED of the Australia Institute were courting countries to sign on to a moratorium on new coal mines. Now in 2025, in part frustrated by the slow movement of the formal COP process, both have become involved in the campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Join Kumi and Richard for a fireside chat that peeks behind the curtain at a decade of international diplomatic work to move the world away from fossil fuels, and what comes next

Kumi Naidoo, is the President of the Fossil Fuel Treaty. Kumi also holds the position of Distinguished visiting lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and is a Professor of Practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.

Kumi has authored and co-authored numerous books, the most recent being Letters To My Mother (2022), a personal and professional memoir that won the HSS 2023 non-fiction award by the National Institute Humanities and Social Sciences.

His dedication to democracy and justice led to notable international roles, including being the first person from the global South to lead Greenpeace International as Executive Director from 2009 to 2016. He later served as the Secretary General of Amnesty International from 2018 to 2020.

Dr Richard Denniss is the executive Director of the Australia Institute, and a prominent Australian economist, author and public policy commentator, and has spent the last twenty years moving between policy-focused roles in academia, federal politics and think-tanks.

He was also a Lecturer in Economics at the university of Newcastle and former Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. He is a regular contributor to The Monthly and the author of several books including: Econobabble, Curing Affluenza and Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next?

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