Many of us living on Miami Beach are witness every day to the impact that climate change has on our beautiful city. The City of Miami Beach has developed its own Climate Action Plan: Miami Beach Rising Above, to address and mitigate the increase in flooding streets, extreme weather, and rising seas.

And now the City is playing host to the Aspen Institute’s global climate conference from May 9 to May 12th. Ticket and Registration info HERE.

The agenda for Aspen Ideas: Climate includes panels, book talks, workshops, field trips, and in the evenings from 8:00 p.m., programming will be “Wallcast” onto the side of the New World Center, with the public invited to watch Aspen Ideas: Climate for free from SoundScape Park each evening.

The inaugural event in Miami Beach will bring some of the most exciting innovators and leaders together with the public to engage with local and global climate solutions with the potential to reshape our world.

More than 130 speakers from across policymaking, science, business, technology, art, architecture, education, food, journalism, and more will attend, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael S. Regan.

Highlights include: (full schedule can be viewed here )

• Kleiner Perkins chairman and venture capitalist John Doerr and engineer and investor Ryan Panchadsaram share their blueprint for saving the planet. The principal of Climate and Nature Solutions and former Canadian Minister for the Earth and the Environment Catherine McKenna examines the progress made on global emission goals. Finally, Colombian President Iván Duque Márquez describes his country’s ambitious plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

• Mayors Francis Suarez, Dan Gelber, and Daniella Levine Cava share Miami’s vision for a more resilient future

• How cities can upgrade their climate infrastructure: with New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, Generate Capital CEO Scott Jacobs, and Sustainable Capital Advisors CEO Trenton Allen

• NBA Commissioner Adam Silver lays out the NBA’s climate action plan to Tom Farrey, head of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program

• Reinventing our food system with local, climate-smart, and scalable solutions: with Devita Davison, executive director at FoodLab Detroit, Center for Good Food Purchasing co-founder Paula Daniels, Indigenous Youth Advocate Samuel Schimmel, Corby Kummer, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Food and Society Program, and Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel

Some of the field trips and walking tours include:

• Snorkel Cleanup hosted by Debris Free Oceans and Ocean Conservancy to clean up the coral reefs off the shores of Miami and Key Largo.

• City of Miami Beach Resilience Tours to learn about the mitigation and adaptation efforts in Miami Beach, including South Pointe Park and Sunset Harbour, the blueprint neighborhood of sea-level rise climate change and adaptation.

• A walking tour of the newly-opened Phase 1 of The Underline, which aims to transform the land below Miami’s Metrorail into a 10-mile linear park, urban trail and public art destination

Our MIAbites nonprofit, Food Rescue US- South Florida will be joining in this mission to find solutions to climate change by rescuing the unused/surplus food from the Miami Beach Convention Center and other venues hosting the conference attendees. With 40% of all food wasted, decomposing food in landfills produces harmful methane gas that impacts our climate.

The Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit organization committed to realizing a free, just, and equitable society. Founded in 1949, the Institute drives change through dialogue, leadership, and action to help solve the most important challenges facing the United States and the world. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the Institute has a campus in Aspen, Colorado, and an international network of partners. For more information, visit www.aspeninstitute.org.