Beyond the Climate Crisis: Panel Curated by Mya-Rose Craig
Youth climate activist Mya-Rose Craig curates a panel designing post-crisis futures built on equity and realignment with nature, part of Southbank's Letters to the Future weekend.
Why we picked this
Craig became the youngest person to be awarded an honorary doctorate from Bristol University in part for her work connecting climate justice and racial equity — this panel is built on that same insistence that you can't separate the two.
Mya-Rose Craig — ornithologist, conservationist, and one of the most prominent young voices at the intersection of climate justice and racial equity — curates this panel as part of Southbank Centre’s Letters to the Future weekend. The focus deliberately sits beyond crisis management: rather than relitigating whether climate change is real or bad, the panel asks what comes after, and who gets to design it.
The equity lens is central to Craig’s work. Her argument — made in books, at COP summits, and through her BirdGirl platform — is that the people most affected by ecological collapse are disproportionately those who have contributed least to it, and that any credible future must be built with them, not for them. This panel brings that framework to bear on the concrete question of post-crisis futures.
Held on the final day of the Letters to the Future weekend, the panel arrives after two days of conversation about digital life, queer storytelling, and education. The juxtaposition is intentional: climate isn’t a silo, and Craig’s approach consistently asks us to see the connections between environmental crisis and the other structural failures of the present moment.