Anna
Rose

Speaker Profile

Anna, Rose co-founded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition in November 2006 and until recently its co-director. The coalition unites a diversity of youth organisations to mobilise a generation of young people to solve the climate crisis; with a membership of over 70,000, the coalition has more members than the Liberals and ALP combined. It runs a Switched On Schools program as well as undertaking advocacy campaigns such as last year's Adopt a Politician. Anna has been involved in youth environment and social justice organising since she was 14.

Anna was elected National Environment Officer for the National Union of Students in 2005 and is past National Convenor of the Australian Student Environment Network. In this role she designed and launched a nation-wide Campus Clean Energy campaign across all 37 Australian Universities, based on work she had done as University of Sydney Student Representative Council (SRC) Environment Officer in 2003. So far, the campaign has achieved significant victories in energy reduction targets and renewable energy across Australian Universities. In her role as NUS National Environment Officer, Anna trained and mentored hundreds of new student leaders in environmental and social justice work, running training workshops on campuses across Australia and writing the first ASEN Campus Organising Guide. She instigated the first annual ASEN Summer Training Camp and worked closely with the staff group Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS).

Anna is a former editor of the Sydney University student paper Honi Soit, member of the United Nations Pacific Youth Environment Network, and Sustainability Team Leader for Project Australia. She frequently speaks and write on climate and energy issues at forums including the recent Blue Planet Summit (Hawaii), Vibewire.net's e-festival of ideas, the This Is Not Art festival, Power Shift 2007 (USA) and the Re-Energize Texas Summit (USA). The highlight of her public speaking career so far was being one of three keynote speakers alongside the Dalai Lama at the Spirituality & Sustainability Forum in Perth's Burswood Dome in June 2007.

Anna completed a summer clerkship in the climate law practice group of the law firm Baker & McKenzie and continues to research climate law issues as a researcher for Professor Tim Stephens at Sydney University Law School. She is also involved in the newly formed University of Sydney Climate Law and Policy Group. Anna recently graduated from an Arts (Asian Studies)/Law degree with first class honours from the University of Sydney, where she was awarded the Alumni Award for Young Alumni Achievement and nominated for the University Convocation Medal.

Anna was a participant in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit in April this year. In 2005 she was a youth representative to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Montreal and in 2007 was a youth delegate to the UN Secretary General's Meeting on Climate Change in New York. She is a contributing editor to the blog ItsGettingHotinHere.org- Dispatches from the Global Youth Climate Movement, and holds a Global Youth Action Net Fellowship from the International Youth Foundation for 2007-2008. Anna spent seven months in the United States last year, where she studied at Cornell on exchange, helped build the US youth climate movement with the Energy Action Coalition, and began working with youth from around the world to establish a global youth climate coalition.

Anna continues some internationally focused work including speaking in Japan at the G8 Civil Society Forum and to a large audience of Japanese student climate activists. She is a recipient of the Future Summit Leadership award, presented by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Anna was a delegate to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Washington DC in 2008. Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian newspaper, describes the Australian–American leadership dialogue as 'the most significant exercise in private diplomacy ever undertaken in Australia.' Anna is also the co-author of The Future, By Us with other young Australian social entrepreneurs, and the author of Madlands: A Journey To Change The Mind of a Climate Sceptic. Part travel story, part scientific exploration, part tale of self-discovery, and part call to arms, Madlands is written to inform, entertain and ultimately to change the debate on climate change in Australia.

On 26 April, 2012, Anna will co-star on the ABC's I Can Change Your Mind About... Climate with conservative Australian political king maker Nick Minchin. Separated by a generation, and divided by their beliefs, in this program these passionate, intelligent and successful Australians go on a journey of mutual discovery to see if they can change each other's minds about the most divisive issue in Australia today: climate change.

In 2010 Anna took up a new role with strategy and consultancy group Make Believe, helping fulfil their mission of helping not-for-profits, socially-responsible companies, foundations, passionate individuals and progressive political parties do good, better.

Travels from New South Wales