"Nature remains our greatest ally to reach our climate mitigation targets. Planting trees is essential, but we need to raise a forest generation that will thrive and live in harmony with nature."

"“The Belo Monte Dam is literally drowning the lungs of the earth, the Amazon rainforest, and clogging its arteries, the great Amazon river that brings water and food to millions of people,”"

"Never to be silenced"

"“I will keep on fighting against what Belo Monte represents: a destructive, unsustainable, and unfeasible development model.”"

"The fact is, there are violent movies all over the world, and there are mental-health issues in other countries. But this doesn’t happen in other developed countries. The difference is guns, and how widely and easily available they are."

"As women we may not be a minority, but there is a bond that we all share."

"We’re in a situation where a predator feels less safe and a professional woman feels more safe, and that’s where we need to be."

"It is not a bond of geography. Or religion. Or culture. It is a bond of shared experience — experiences that only women go through, and struggles that only women face."

"“I have spent seven very fulfilling years here. I loved coming to work here. I respect the persons with whom I worked in this institution and have the highest regard for the staff—for the Clerk of the House (Jacqui Sampson-Meiguel) and the Clerk of the Senate (Brian Caesar). So I am going to miss this place.”"

"“My friends have told me that I wouldn’t be able to lime with them anymore. I still intend to go out with them.”"

"I don’t think people realise that there’s a flogging taking place a kilometer away when they’re sunbathing at their resort."

"I think because of the brave women who have come forward to tell their stories, the future workplace will be safer for my daughter than it was for people of my generation."

"“You are always striving. That’s something I’ve found in my life; I’m always trying to push for something to be different, for things to change in the world. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just not try and change anything, to just sit with it, but that’s not in my personality. I’m always interested in how things can be better.”"

"“The ideas around circular economy and so forth are a major philosophical change in that previously we have thought there is an outside to the environment that we live in, that there is always ‘somewhere else’ that we can put our waste. The truth is that there is only one environment, and we all have to live here. So anything that is ‘waste’ must be an input to some other process that is useful.”"

"My parents both have a very strong ethos around social justice and were very passionate about helping in the community. It was never something they talked about, but my parents, both in their work and in the way that they showed up in the world, contributed to the community."

"The world has learned just how problematic the disruption that the Covid-19 pandemic has been, but the mother of all disruptions remains climate change"

"At school I was very passionate about music, drama and sport. We had a big kayaking focus at our school, and I was kayaking captain. I was also music captain and played the clarinet. In fact, I almost applied to do music at university. I was debating between music and science and then I had this moment when I was at schoolies in Byron Bay."

"Clean energy is the cheapest source of new power and in the Australian context, electricity prices have been rising because our electricity system is aging. It's inefficient. It's polluting. So, replacing that energy system with clean technology, with renewables, with storage, is absolutely a critical part of the recovery puzzle."

"“I took myself off one morning and sat on the beach, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ It seems very naïve now, but I wrote down, ‘I want to save the world from environmental pollution.’”"

"There are several so-called negative emissions technologies that could remove carbon dioxide from the air, including those aimed at removing CO2 by enhancing natural forest and wetland uptake, using bio-energy in power production and scrubbing CO2 efficiently from air."

"To make negative emission technologies viable, industry needs physical and measurable proof of those which will be most effective and then the means to implement them at full scale. That means large government and private investments in research and development for these technologies."

"I later asked my father why he chose to migrate with me of all his children and he told me he had seen that I was strong and would grow up to be even stronger"

"When I came back home for my secondary school in Mochudi I was the only girl in a class of seven and fortunately or unfortunately I happened to be the most intelligent. This made me a subject of talk and ridicule by the boys who were somehow bitter that they were being overshadowed by a girl. It was then that I realized it was sometimes an issue to be a girl"

"For us to raise the girl child at the same level in rural and urban areas, we need to give them the chance to speak for themselves, to tell us what they need, their choices and what their visionary paths are"

"In terms of numbers we were almost equal but men had an upper hand and louder voices. It was like women didn’t exist. And since I was teaching in the rural areas I also interacted a lot with the local women where I realized that women were carrying more than enough on their shoulders"

"there have been historical imbalances from the traditional socialisation of boys and girls under which the boy child was socialised to be more economically empowered.However, the pioneer gender activist warned against any attempts at tinkering with the status quo"

"I want us not to quarrel with this culture, we must appreciate it because after all a nation without a culture is a lost nation"

"In those days the gender agenda was still very foreign but since it was something within me when the time came to advance it, there was no turning back"

"society today should rather dissect the culture to examine whether it advantages or disadvantages the girl child. There is need to educate the girl child, and the right approach to this will nurture girls with the right self-esteem and resourcefulness, she said."

"The communities that I serve are plagued by violence and substance abuse. A few years into my career, my best friend, Angel Jackson and her father Herbert Levi Sharpe, Sr. were murdered. This changed the trajectory of my entire career and I began to focus more on mental health and mindfulness in the black community."

"I am passionate about connecting children of color to yoga and mindfulness and in building healthy communities by disrupting historical trauma and poverty."

"Nearly twenty years ago, I began as a classroom teacher in Richmond, VA. Many of my students struggled due to community and domestic violence."

"I loved theater and writing short stories as a child. I was always a creative and energetic child."

""Connect girls and inspire them for the future."

"My strength also comes from the fact that I still want to work and share what I have with other people so we all can have better lives"

"As I continue to explore the knowledge and wisdom of people around the world working to build and strengthen their communities, I’ve been uncovering inspiring examples of local initiatives striving for a carbon neutral future."

"Inspired to act by the global efforts to reduce nonrenewable fuel dependence and to uncouple their essential infrastructure from fossil fuels, communities have taken it upon themselves to do their part to transition towards a sustainable future even if governments at the national level have been lagging behind."

"Any concerns over costs, though, should be compared to cost of doing nothing."

"The community ownership model is a community benefit model. It's a community enterprise, so basically there's multiple dimensions of how the community receives benefits."

"There's generally a sustainability fund or a grant system that feeds back profit into the community. As well as local employment. And by having local membership, you keep the profits in the local economy."

"I really believe that energy is like the blood of society. It's something that we don't really talk about. But it's the veins that keep everything operating. As non-renewable resources run out, we really need to think about what is the best way that we can still keep pumping our blood and keep existing."

"I think having community owned projects and generating our energy, bringing that back to being near us, so we know that we are connected to our energy source is coming from. That's an empowering process for communities on so many levels."

"“She thought football was like soccer,” Edelstein said to “Philadelphia Daily News” after Diana passed away in 1997. “She asked, ‘What are your colors?’ I said, ‘Green and silver.’ She said, ‘Those are my favorite colors.’“"

"The law must serve the people, not stand above them."

"We had to improvise. We literally had to create the word. “Wesibawi tinkosa.”"

"A society that excludes women from leadership is a society that denies itself progress."

"You might not be happy with the decisions that I make in this position."

"Justice is not a privilege, it is a right that every citizen must enjoy."

"I told them, if they want business as usual, I’m not the right person for this job."

"When women rise, nations rise with them."