Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about

ambitious leadership for the environment. I'm Gwen Buck, I'm a policy advisor in our politics team.

I run Green Alliance's Climate Leadership Program for MPs, which aims to give cross-party MPs the skills, knowledge and confidence that they need to become climate champions in Parliament.

And so I'm delighted to welcome Rebecca Willis onto the podcast.

Rebecca is a professor in practice at Lancaster University and an expert lead for the UK Climate Assembly.

To crack climate change, we need more democracy and better democracy, not less.

What we need to do is actually make democracy work better

to work with people so that they understand the climate issue

and so that they can contribute to the solutions.

She's an expert in politics and climate change and has

recently published her book Too Hot to Handle the Democratic Challenge of Climate Change. It's just a

great way of hearing from people who don't normally have the power or frankly the money

to influence the political process, but they are sure as

hell affected by it.

During this episode, we'll talk about citizens assemblies, which are a type of deliberative

process in which representative group of the public or a mini public are given the time, space

and information to

consider an issue at depth. I'm so happy that we get to do this podcast together and I get to

interview you because I was actually thinking about our work together and how I think we actually

met about four years ago when you ran Shear Sustainable, which was an event

to help young women who are just starting out in the environment sector to help them start

out their career in climate change and in the environment sector. So it's really nice to sort of come

...