The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre invites you to the 10th annual event in the Mary Robinson Speaker Series on Business and Human Rights in New York City:

“Turning up the heat: Solutions from indigenous peoples and progressive business to drive the transition to a low-carbon economy"; Fri, September 20, 2019 | 6:00 - 8:00pm | Roosevelt House, 47-49 East 65th Street NY

WATCH THE LIVESTREAM HERE

Introduction by Mary Robinson, President, Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, and UN Secretary General's Special Envoy on El Niño and Climate. With keynote speaker Ikal Angelei, Director of Friends of Lake Turkana in Kenya, which she co-founded in 2008, and Goldman Enviornmental Prize Recipient.

A rapid and yet rights-respecting transition to a low-carbon economy is a global human rights imperative. Around the world, cities and communities are already grappling with the land, waters, and livelihoods challenges of climate change. At the same time, stakeholders need to do more to ensure that the growth of the renewable energy sector doesn’t further undermine the rights of the most vulnerable, who already face the biggest impacts of climate change. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of this global movement, both in facing the effects of extreme climate change and in proposing innovative solutions. For this 10th anniversary Mary Robinson Speaker Series event, we will welcome a panel of indigenous leaders, business representatives, investors, and civil society for a robust discussion on how these groups could work together to tackle this pressing global challenge.

About Ikal Angelei

Ikal is an indigenous rights, environmental justice activist from Kenya, working across the region but with a focus on the Turkana basin. She is a social-justice activist who has been defending resource and social-environmental rights from the grassroots to international levels for over 10 years. Ikal is the founder and director of Friends of Lake Turkana and her main concerns include protection of ecosystems, land and water rights of communities, upholding human rights and demanding accountability of political and corporate power especially around natural resource use and governance.

Ikal is currently a PhD candidate at University of Leicester Department of Geography looking at the Political Ecology of Oil Extraction in Turkana, and has a master's in Public Policy from the Department of Political Science in State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Nairobi. She has received a number of awards, including the Goldman Environmental Award (also known as the Green Nobel) in 2012, the Conservation International Fellowship, and the Luc Hoffman Medal, among others. 

About Friends of Lake Turkana

Friends of Lake Turkana (FoLT) is a grassroots organization that works in the greater Turkana basin with a mission to foster economic and social resource and environmental justice. FoLT works to protect the environment, advancing human rights protection and advocacy through sound policy and practices, and; giving voice to rural, indigenous people, and pastoralists, who historically have been denied access to benefits accruing from the extraction and use of their land and other natural resources within their territories.