The President of the Rockefeller Foundation discusses the need for new solutions for energy transformation and economic development. We cannot end poverty without ending energy poverty. Ever since the world’s first power plants whirred to life in 1882, we have seen how electricity is the lynchpin for development in all of its forms. Manufacturing and industrial productivity, agriculture and food security, nutrition, hygiene, water, public health, education, even community engagement, in other words, daily life in a modern economy, demand access to reliable energy. And yet despite significant progress over nearly 140 years, more than 800 million people around the world live without access to electricity, and hundreds of millions more struggle with unreliable or unaffordable service. Families are deprived of the means to labour productively and their quality of life and status in extreme poverty goes unchanged. We need urgently to fast-track sustainable power solutions, investments, and partnerships across the globe to catalyze an energy transformation and accelerate sustainable, reliable and modern electrification for economic development.

Prof Beinhocker will argue that by changing the ideologies, narratives, and memes that govern our economic system, we can create the political space required to rapidly transform to a sustainable and just economic system. The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices. Furthermore, over the past 40 years, the gains of growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top 10%, fuelling populist anger across many countries, endangering both democracy and global action on climate change. This talk will argue that underlying the current dominant model of capitalism are a set of theories and ideologies that are outdated, unscientific, and morally unsound. New foundations can be built from modern understandings of human behaviour, complex systems science, and broad moral principles. By changing the ideologies, narratives, and memes that govern our economic system, we can create the political space required for the policies and actions required to rapidly transform to a sustainable and just economic system.

Professor Sir Paul Collier and Professor Colin Mayer CBE will share the latest thinking and research into the future of capitalism and the corporation to understand how business might be changed to make it work better for society. The speakers will bring together their new books, The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties and Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good, alongside the British Academy's Future of the Corporation programme research to pose serious questions of our economic system.

Nick Eyre and Myles Allen give a talk for the Oxford Martin School on climate change and the IPCC report. One of the key objectives of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed in 2014, was to provide a comprehensive description of the science of climate change and options for adaptation and mitigation for negotiators preparing for the Paris Conference in 2015. IPCC authors Myles Allen and Nick Eyre will explain the IPCC process, and ask whether this model of a technical panel giving “policy relevant, not policy prescriptive” advice to governments is still working. They will highlight some key findings, such as the increased level of confidence that human influence is the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th-century, the importance of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, the challenges of emission reductions, but also the multiple mitigation pathways still open for achieving the goal of limiting warming to 2oC. They will also discuss some of the things the IPCC does not do, such as specifically attributing blame for observed climate change impacts, and ask what the options are for the IPCC going forward.

Dr Nathalie Seddon, Director of the Biodiversity Institute, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School. The future of biodiversity conservation is under increasing threat from both climate change and human impact. Dr Nathalie Seddon, Director of the Biodiversity Institute, will look at how rapid growth of climate change affects our ecosystems, how species’ will be forced to adapt to survive, and how we can reduce the effects of climate change on our planet.

Sir John Beddington, Senior Adviser at the Oxford Martin School, gives a talk on climate change Some five years ago Sir John Beddington, Senior Adviser at the Oxford Martin School, raised the concept of 'The Perfect Storm' in which the issues of food, water and energy security needed to be addressed at the same time as mitigating and adapting to climate change. In this seminar he highlights changes that have occurred since then and the progress made and challenges that are currently faced.

Professor Gideon Henderson, Professor of Earth Sciences, and Professor David Marshall, Professor of Physical Oceanography, will explore the role of oceans in climate change. How are oceans affected by our rapidly changing climate? What can they tell us about the processes controlling climate change? And what role do they play in driving climate?

In this seminar Dr Rob Bellamy, James Martin Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, will explore how and why people disagree about how to tackle climate change. What hope then is there for a global political agreement in Paris 2015?

In this talk Professor Tim Palmer CBE, Co-Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School. Tim Palmer will address three related questions. Firstly, what are the physical reasons why predictions of climate change are necessarily uncertain? Secondly, how can we communicate this uncertainty in a simple but rigorous way to those policy makers for whom uncertainty quantification may seem an unnecessary complication. Finally, what is needed to reduce uncertainty about future climate change? For the latter, I will argue that the sort of inspiration and ambition that led to the Large Hadron Collider is now needed for the development of climate-change science.

John Kampfner and Katrine Marçal discuss the growing gap between rich and poor and its implications for society, chaired by Professor Ian Goldin. This roundtable is part of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival 2015, the Oxford Martin School is the Festival Ideas Partner Is it morally justified to allow the creation of a 'super rich' that leave the rest behind? Is the growing gap between rich and poor actually holding back wider economic growth and financial wellbeing? Could it be a cause of social unrest? And what can we do to address the gap between rich and poor? This panel event is one of a series of roundtable talks and audience question time hosted by the Oxford Martin School.