Tom Rivett-Carnac

Tom Rivett-Carnac OBE is one of the world’s foremost climate strategists — a political architect, bestselling author, and podcaster who has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of diplomacy, business, and environmental action. His career spans the United Nations, Silicon Valley, global finance, and the conservation world, giving him a rare vantage point on why the climate transition is not only necessary but achievable — and what leaders, companies, and governments must do to accelerate it.

Sustainability speaker Tom Rivett-Carnac is perhaps best known as one of the key architects of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change of 2015. From 2013 to 2016, he served as Senior Advisor to the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where he led the political strategy that produced one of the most significant diplomatic breakthroughs in modern history — a binding international accord signed by 196 parties. Earlier in his career, he served as President and CEO of CDP North America (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), where he helped build the infrastructure of corporate climate disclosure that now shapes investment decisions globally. He also worked as Climate Strategist at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X), and co-founded Mission 2020, a campaign to bend the global emissions curve before 2020.

After leaving the UN in 2016, Rivett-Carnac co-founded Global Optimism with Christiana Figueres — an enterprise dedicated to building the partnerships and mindset shifts required to meet the scale of the climate challenge. From that platform, he co-founded The Climate Pledge with Amazon, a coalition of more than 200 companies committed to reaching net zero by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement timeline. He is a Fellow at the Bezos Earth Fund, serves on the Expert Review Panel for the Earthshot Prize, sits on the sustainability advisory boards of Netflix and Watershed, and is a Trustee of ClientEarth.

Author, Podcaster, and Global Voice on Climate Action

In 2020, Rivett-Carnac and Figueres co-authored The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis, an international bestseller translated into 14 languages that has become a reference text for leaders navigating the climate transition. His TED Talk has surpassed 3 million views, and he co-hosts the award-winning weekly podcast Outrage + Optimism alongside Figueres and Paul Dickinson, which consistently ranks among the world’s top climate podcasts. He was appointed OBE in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to tackling climate change, and holds an honorary PhD from Knox College, Illinois.

As a sustainability speaker, Tom Rivett-Carnac brings something rare to the stage: the credibility of someone who has negotiated with heads of state and the clarity of a communicator who knows how to move an audience from anxiety to agency. His talks challenge the false choice between economic ambition and climate responsibility, offering leaders a framework for what he calls “stubborn optimism” — the conviction that the crisis is real, the solutions exist, and the window to act remains open. Senior audiences leave with a sharper understanding of the political and corporate dynamics shaping the energy transition, and a concrete sense of the role their organisations can play.