Meet the Speakers
Colin Hunt
Chief Executive Officer, AIB Group
Colin Hunt was appointed Chief Executive Officer of AIB and an Executive Director on the AIB Board in March 2019. He joined AIB in August 2016 as Managing Director, Wholesale, Institutional & Corporate Banking Division.
Prior to joining AIB, he was Managing Director at Macquarie Capital where he led the development of its business in Ireland. Previously, he was a Special Policy Adviser at the Departments of Transport and Finance, Research Director and Chief Economist at Goodbody Stockbrokers, Head of Trading Research and Senior Economist at Bank of Ireland Group Treasury and a country risk analyst at NatWest.
He has a PhD in Economics from Trinity College, Dublin and degrees in Commerce & Economics from University College, Cork. He served as a Non-Executive Director of Aer Lingus Group plc from 2008 to 2014. Colin served as president of Ibec in 2025-2026, is a Board member of The Ireland Funds, Ireland Chapter, and was President 2021/2022 of the Institute of Bankers in Ireland.
Al Gore
Former Vice President of the Unites States
Former Vice President Al Gore is the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis, a founding partner and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and a co-founder of Climate TRACE. He is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees.
Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years.
He is the author of the #1 New York Times best-sellers ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and ‘The Assault on Reason’, the NYT best-sellers ‘Earth in the Balance’, ‘Our Choice: A Plan To Solve the Climate Crisis’, ‘The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change’, and most recently, The New York Times best-seller ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power’.
He is the subject of the documentary movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, which won two Oscars in 2006 and a second documentary in 2017, ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power’.
In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for ‘informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change’.
Christiana Figueres
Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican citizen and an internationally recognized leader on climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010 to 2016. During her tenure at the UNFCCC, Ms. Figueres brought together national and sub-national governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions and NGOs to jointly deliver the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, in which 195 sovereign nations agreed on a collaborative path forward to limit future global warming to well below 2°C, and strive for 1.5°C, in order to protect the most vulnerable. For this achievement Ms. Figueres has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy and received multiple awards. Since then Ms. Figueres has continued to accelerate the global response to climate change. Today she is the co-founder of Global Optimism, co-host of the podcast Outrage + Optimism and is the co-author of ‘The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimists' Guide to the Climate Crisis. Ms. Figueres sits on multiple executive and advisory boards and is a frequent public speaker and media commentator. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the London School of Economics. She lives in Costa Rica and has two fantastic daughters.