
12–15 October 2026 · Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Programme structure and timings are indicative. Speaker line-ups will be confirmed closer to the conference.
Objective
Urban systems are rapidly becoming the front line of climate risk, health outcomes, and economic transformation. This session explores how cities can act as powerful positive tipping points — driving emissions reduction, resilient infrastructure, social equity, health and wellbeing at scale. The plenary will showcase how urban governance, planning, and community engagement can unlock rapid systems change across transport, housing, food, and green space. Participants will identify actionable pathways for cities to move from incremental sustainability to transformative impact.
Objective
A thirty-minute reflection, in words and potentially in music, on the human dimension of the planetary crisis: the values, faith and cultural resources that societies draw on when they choose transformation, and the courage individual action requires. Speaking from a life that has itself moved across cultures, traditions and reinventions, the speaker brings a voice recognised across generations and geographies to the conference's central conviction: that the planetary transition is, at root, a human one, and that what moves people to act is rarely data alone.
Objective
Finally, the session hands the work forward. The declaration and the full conference outputs pass to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, host of GTP 2027, to feed the Global Tipping Points Report 2027, and into the priorities that delegations and coalitions carry forward in various multilateral processes of consequence. Participants leave not with a warning but with a working map of where the leverage lies, and a shared commitment to act on it within their own spheres of authority.