AGENDA: Seeds of Change: Responding to Global Change in a Bottom-up World

Sponsors: Posner Center for International Development, RESOLVE, Inc., Newmont Mining Corporation, and Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. Conference moderators, panelists and speakers included University of Colorado Law School professors Phil Weiser, Sarah Krakoff, Britt Banks, and Lakshman Guruswamy. This conference is made possible through the generous support of donors who sponsored this year’s Martz Sustainability Symposium (including Newmont Mining Corporation) and those who have invested in our Clyde O. Martz Endowed Fund for Natural Resources Management (including Brian Dolan and Davis Graham and Stubbs LLP). The Martz Natural Resources Management Fund was established in the memory of natural resources law pioneer Clyde Martz and supports innovative programming at Colorado Law in best practices in natural resources management. Many believe that global institutions and frameworks are failing to generate necessary progress on issues such as climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity, food security, and poverty eradication; and that state, tribal and local governments and communities, innovative companies, social and technology entrepreneurs, NGOs, impact investors, consumers and philanthropists increasingly are taking the lead in creating bottom-up solutions to these challenges. The conference will explore this dynamic in detail, with an emphasis on the drivers behind these ground level innovations, and on how they can better “filter up” to inform the global conversations occurring on how best to address the various dimensions of “global change”