Alex Kirby

Alex Kirby, former environmental journalist with the BBC News and author of Kick the Habit: A UN Guide to Climate Neutrality, will act as master moderator during Aquaterra 2009. Kirby is a renowned advocate for the environment and will make sure to entice members of the panel to speak their mind. He’ll fire up the debates, don’t miss the chance to be part of it!

Alex Kirby is a former BBC journalist. Before joining the Corporation he was a Reuters stringer in Burkina Faso, and later the BBC Maghreb correspondent, based in Algiers. Between 1987 and 2005 he was environment correspondent for BBC Radio and then TV News, and latterly for the BBC News website. From 1999 to 2005 he also presented the BBC Radio 4 environment programme Costing the Earth. He now works with universities, charities, international agencies and other non-governmental organisations - and with UK-based Islamic groups - to improve their media skills. He is an adviser to the Islam is Peace campaign. He also works with developing world journalists specialising in reporting on the environment. He is a founder member of Science & Faith Unite on Biodiversity, launched in Oxford in 2007, and an honorary visiting fellow of Green College, University of Oxford.

He wrote Kick the Habit: A UN Guide to Climate Neutrality, published by UNEP/GRID-Arendal in June 2008, and has worked as a media training consultant for GRID in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Africa. He has worked for the British Council with journalists and others concerned to know more about climate change in Yemen and China. He was a media consultant to the UN Environment Programme for the launch in 2007 of its report GEO-4, and for the 2008 launch of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, co-sponsored by FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank, and WHO.