The climate crisis is vast, complex and often feels both imminent and frustratingly out of our control. With global systems slow to change and the scale of the challenge immense, it’s easy to wonder if individual action could ever be enough.

On World Environment Day, Climate Warriors brought together four transformative voices; renewable energy expert and former Biden administration advisor Saul Griffith, Solar Citizen CEO Heidi Lee Douglas, climate activist Grace Vegesana along with host and journalist Craig Reucassel, to unpack the power and limitations of grassroots action, climate innovation and community-driven change.

From local initiatives to systemic shifts, they unpacked what’s working, what isn’t, and where real impact is being made. While no single effort can solve the climate crisis, collective action has the potential to tip the balance.

Presented by the UNSW Centre for Ideas and UNSW Engineering, in association with the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit.

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Artificial intelligence’s collision with human creativity is one of the most important stories of our time.

With the accelerating impact of AI, so much of what we understand about being human is being re-written.

Acclaimed writer Jeanette Winterson (12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love) sees AI changing our lives in unprecedented ways. Academic and researcher Toby Walsh (The Shortest History of AI) predicts the place AI will have in our futures.

Hear Jeanette and Toby bring the perspectives of an artist and a scientist together in this important contemporary conversation. With an introduction from Verity Firth.

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Acclaimed Indonesian author Norman Erikson Pasaribu and award-winning Australian writer Dylin Hardcastle explore the joy, tenderness and triumphs of queer storytelling.

Norman, best known for Happy Stories, Mostly, and their latest book My Dream Job, crafts tender yet sharp narratives about identity, faith and belonging, challenging the expectations of queer life in Indonesia. While Dylin, acclaimed for A Language of Limbs, offers an Australian perspective on intimacy, loss and transformation. Together their work embraces and reclaims; highlighting how storytelling becomes an act of survival and resistance for lives too often kept in the margins.

Hear Norman and Dylin, alongside UNSW’s Christy Newman, as they explore how literature creates space for voices long silenced – and how the most powerful stories are the ones that heal.

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Beneath the ocean’s surface, fibre-optic cables pulse with the entirety of our human existence – memes and messages, stock trades and state secrets. But when these fragile threads break, so too can the connections that bind us.

Hear award-winning author Colum McCann join The Daily Aus’ Sam Koslowski to explore truth, misinformation and human connection in a world driven by technology, and his latest book Twist.

Together they unpack the power of fiction to reflect societal truths, rupture, repair and resilience in an age of hyper-communication, asking: how do we navigate a world where information is abundant, but authenticity is elusive? And in an era of digital disarray, can we still mend the severed connections of our society?

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Richard Holden | Alan Kohler

Australia, a land of sweeping plains, has one of the lowest population densities on the planet. So, how did we end up with a housing shortage?

In conversation with economist and author Richard Holden, veteran finance journalist Alan Kohler’s new Quarterly Essay, The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Crisis and How to Fix It, investigates where things went wrong at the start of the 21st century with escalating property prices leading to a rental crisis, a dearth of public housing and a mortgage crunch.

This event is presented by the Sydney Writers' Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney.

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Machines lead the charge on today’s battlefields, but what does this mean for the people caught in the crossfire?

Learn from journalist Antony Loewenstein, whose Walkley Award-winning investigation, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, uncovered the widespread commercialisation and global deployment of Israeli weaponry tested in Palestinian territories. Antony is joined by AI expert Toby Walsh, whose new book, Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, explores how AI impersonates human intelligence.

Listen to this vital conversation with host Michael Richardson about the intersection of technology, conflict, occupation and surveillance.

This event is presented by the Sydney Writers' Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney.

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How did sex begin? How did it evolve to become so varied and complex in humans? And what could sex look like for future generations?

Hosted by evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks, this blush-worthy panel discussion features sex historian Esmé Louise James and historian David Baker. Esmé adapted her wildly popular TikTok series into a book, Kinky History: The Stories of Our Intimate Lives, Past and Present, and David’s Sex: Two Billion Years of Procreation and Recreation charts sex’s evolution from early life to sexbots.

Listen now to bone up on carnal knowledge across the centuries and find out what the future of fornication holds.

This event was presented by the Sydney Writers' Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney.

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Economist John N. Friedman has made a career researching the causes of inequality and its long-term consequences for children in the US. His findings are grim. Social mobility is in sharp decline. Where you live and go to school increasingly determines your success and future. Joining fellow economist, Richard Holden, Friedman will explore how policy can harness schools, neighbourhoods, universities, and social capital to reverse this trend, and revive a fading “American Dream” of progress and social mobility. Explore what this could mean in a country like Australia.

Presented as part of The Ethics Centre's Festival of Dangerous Ideas, supported by UNSW Sydney.

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