Shameem Akhtar is a teacher working to empower girls in Sindh, a province in the southeast of Pakistan.

UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore is a champion of economic development, education, health and humanitarian assistance.

What if we took out more greenhouse gases than we put into the atmosphere? This hypothetical scenario, known as "drawdown," is our only hope of averting climate disaster, says strategist Chad Frischmann. In a forward-thinking talk, he shares solutions to climate change that exist today -- conventional tactics like the use of renewable energy and...

Vicki Arroyo uses environmental law and her background in biology and ecology to help prepare for global climate change.

About this event: XIME, Kochi is happy to announce the launch of 2nd Edition of the TEDx event at our campus. 'TEDxXIMEKochi' is an independently organized TED event that aims at bringing great value of inspiration through thought-provoking conversations. Our goal is to bring together bright minds, to give talks that are idea-focused and subject-driven to foster...

The face of nuclear terror has changed since the Cold War, but disaster-medicine expert Irwin Redlener reminds us the threat is still real. He looks at some of history's farcical countermeasures and offers practical advice on how to survive an attack.

Sixty-five million people were displaced from their homes by conflict and disaster in 2016. It's not just a crisis; it's a test of who we are and what we stand for, says David Miliband -- and each of us has a personal responsibility to help solve it. In this must-watch talk, Miliband gives us specific, tangible ways to help refugees and turn emp...

When a freak tornado hit their hometown, sisters Caitria and Morgan O'Neill -- just 20 and 24 at the time -- realized they had to jump in and help. What they learned is: After a natural disaster, there's only a tiny window before the world turns its sympathy (and its donations) elsewhere -- so it's important to be prepared for every aspect of re...

How can we begin to address the global, insidious problem of climate change — a problem that's too big for any one country to solve? Economist Nicholas Stern lays out a plan, presented to the UN's Climate Summit in 2014, showing how the world's countries can work together on climate. It's a big vision for cooperation, with a payoff that goes far...

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its ow...

So many of us have been moved to mail a box of clothes, toiletries, food or toys after hearing about a natural disaster or tragic event. But humanitarian logistics expert Dale Herzog says: Ask yourself three questions before sending another box into the chaos. In the bleak winter days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, a t...

About this event: businessly talking, we all know that management is everything. If you don’t manage your resources properly your business won’t succeed, it’s as simple as that. In business we put systems in place and train our human capital to manage and execute the systems. If our systems are efficient and our training is adequate, usually the outcome is a d...

About this event: TEDxAddis is an independently organized TEDx event operated under license from TED. While TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, the 2010-2011 TEDxAddis events featured talks on insurance schemes for disaster risk management in Africa, the investment potential of agriculture, making music in the moment, streaming algorithms, greeni...

Team Rubicon’s latest mission is called Operation: Greased Lightning. What does that mean, you ask? In this powerful talk, given at TEDxSanDiego in 2011, Jake Wood shares his experience co-founding Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization that uses veterans to do the difficult work of search and rescue, supply disbursement and debris cl...

Hurricane Sandy is currently hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, threatening a large swath of the United States’ East Coast, from North Carolina to Maine. With coastal areas evacuated, wind and rainfall picking up quickly and many transportation systems shut down in anticipation of flooding, millions of people are currently at home, just waiti...

The paradox of finding peace in a war zone, and a way to make aid more effective -- by decentralizing it and thus speeding it up. Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, this week’s talks, wh...

About this event: The seventh edition of TEDxTallinn took place on 25th April 2015 at Kultuurikatel. There were over a dozen amazing speakers from different fields who will talk on the TEDxTallinn 2015 stage. This year we saw talks from the following speakers: - Dr Gregory Ciottone, one of the most well-known traumatologists in the United States and the lead...

About this event: About TEDxHindustanUniversity TEDxHindustanUniversity was held on Saturday, 16th Feb, 2013 with 16 distinguished speakers drawn from the spheres of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The venue for the same was Hindustan University, Bay Range Campus, Chennai. The 100 number attendees were from various walks of life and took back the inspi...

The TED community has been busy in the past week. Below, a few TEDsters with news to share. Mapping by the millions. Frustrated by the inability to test his theories given the current technology, Sebastian Seung embarked on what many of his colleagues considered career suicide: he built a game to map all the neural connections in the human ...

Speaking one month after the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Lisa Margonelli shows how drilling moratoriums and executive ousters make for good theater, but distract us from the issue at heart: our unrestrained oil consumption. She shares her bold plan to wean America off oil -- by confronting consumers with its real cost.

Oh, the places you’ll go with TEDx. This week, we’ve been exploring everything beyond the urban jungle. We followed an explorer to the dark caverns of underground caves, an astronaut to outer space, a time lapse photographer to fields and mountain ranges, and a group of TEDx’ers to the top of snowy Mount Everest. This is the kind of global pers...

Here come the acronyms: In March, the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a working draft of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from Working Group II (WGII), on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” in the world’s climate. The 2590-page report was studded with dense charts containing ... a lot of ...

If your home had been devastated by a disaster, would you stay? Why do people choose to remain in potentially life-threatening places? These are just a few of the complex questions that photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart and filmmaker Holly Morris explore in their respective work, documenting the lives of people living in Chernobyl and Fuk...

Michael Pritchard is very likely the only person to have stood on the TED stage and uttered the immortal phrase, "Let's get a bit of that poo in there." At TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford, he demonstrated his then-new product, the Lifesaver bottle, which can be used to turn filthy, rabbit-dropping-infested water into sparklingly clean liquid that's saf...

Human potential is a double-edged sword; it can be turned to great good or great evil. This session is about the discovery, liberation and channeling of human potential in ways that make the world around us a better place. But first, Alsarah & the Nubatones introduce us to East African retro-pop. As Alsarah says from stage mid-set: "T...

Most disasters come with heart-breaking visuals -- innocent victims, burned wreckage. Our looming water disaster is invisible. Will anyone notice before it's too late? Last week in Fresno, California, in the middle of areas hardest hit by the state's five-year drought, Donald Trump voiced the opinion that "there is no drought." Instead, he blam...

For some people, climate change can be an abstract concept, especially if they’re living somewhere that hasn’t experienced serious effects yet. Art is one effective way to provide people with a vision of what the future could look like if we do take action -- or if we don’t. That’s why TED Countdown -- a global rallying cry to cut greenho...

Pat Mitchell, curator of TEDWomen, shares this report with the TED Blog: In April, I had the privilege of moderating a discussion at the Skoll World Forum on the subject of “Leading Through Adversity.” My panel consisted of four powerful women: Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president (watch Mary Robinson's TED Talk); Halla Tómasadótti...

Volunteering at NGOs around the world convinced Peter Haas there had to be a better way to help villages develop. He co-founded the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) to empower locals to start their own businesses that bring clean water, electricity and sanitation to their communities -- and keep them there. Inte...

In this emotionally charged conversation with journalist Kurt Andersen, designer David Rockwell discusses the process of building a viewing platform at Ground Zero shortly after 9/11.