About the Author

Aubrey Meyer was born in Bradford in 1947. He grew up in South Africa and studied music at the University of Cape Town during the 1960s, from where he graduated B. Mus. in 1968 and later M. Mus. After a brief period at the Royal College of Music in London in 1970, he played as Principal Viola in the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast, the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the CAPAB Orchestra in Cape Town and then as a section player in the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1980s. Intermittently throughout this period he wrote music for various ensembles including two prize-winning orchestral ballet scores.
It was while searching for a subject for a musical in 1988 that stories of the death of the Brazilian social activist Chico Mendez led him to join the UK Green Party in 1989 and then to co-found the Global Commons Institute (GCI) in London in 1990.
He spent the next decade contributing to the policy working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and campaigning at the United Nations negotiations on climate change to win acceptance of the global ethic of 'equity and survival' and the policy framework known as 'Contraction and Convergence' (C&C). C&C is now becoming the most widely supported global framework within which to resolve policies and measures to avert dangerous climate change. In 1998 he won the Andrew Lees Memorial Award with the following citation: "Aubrey Meyer, almost single-handedly and with minimal resources, has made an extraordinary impact on the negotiations on the Climate Change Treaty, one of the most important of our time, through his campaign for a goal of equal per capita emissions, which is now the official negotiating position of many governments, and is gaining acceptance in developed and developing countries alike." In 2000 he received the Schumacher Award for the continuation of these efforts.

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