Speaker Profile
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a world leader on global climate change and human rights
"Until now, there has been no human connection with climate change -- just bureaucracies. Few grasp it until they hear the stories." In 2007, Sheila Watt-Cloutier was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for using her advocacy work to show the impact of global climate change on human rights, especially in the Arctic, where it is felt more immediately and dramatically than anywhere else. (The Arctic, she reminds us, is the planet’s health barometer; what happens in the world, happens there first.)
Watt-Cloutier is in the business of changing public opinion into public policy. In her stirring keynotes, she takes us to the Arctic, where Inuit today face profound challenges to their environment, their wildlife and their culture. The environment changes, she shows us, are connected to the cars we drive, the industries we support, the green house gases we emit, the disposable world we have become and the policies we create. "We have a right to life, health, security, land use, subsistence and culture," she says of the Inuit. "These issues are the real politics of climate change."
Paradoxically, the Arctic has also drawn attention for its rich resources and its newly opening shipping routes. To ensure that development across the North is conducted carefully and with balance, our world must re-connect around our shared Arctic, our shared atmosphere, our shared humanity. Watt-Cloutier shows us how. "Changing public opinion to public policy is the route we must now take, and we must now speak environment, foreign and economic policy in the same breath."
Based out of Nunavut, Sheila Watt-Cloutier is an Officer of the Order of Canada. She is also a recipient of a UN Lifetime Achievement Award for Human Development, the Rachel Carson Prize, a Global Green USA Award, and an Aboriginal Achievement Award. As the Canadian Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (a position she held from 1995 to 2002), she helped negotiate the Stockholm Convention, the landmark global treaty banning POPs. She was later elected the International Chair of the ICC, a post she held until 2006. She was also part of the group that launched the world's first international legal action on climate change.