The coming Festival Albertine, an annual gathering of American and Francophone activists, intellectuals, writers and artists, will focus on a truly international topic: climate change. The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Albertine Books announced Tuesday that Bill McKibben, the tenacious environmentalist and author of “The End of Nature” and other titles, will be the curator of this year’s festival, which will run Nov. 8-10 at Albertine Books on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“We’re finally in a real climate moment,” Mr. McKibben said. “It’s precisely when we need to be talking really seriously about where we are.”

To facilitate this conversation, Mr. McKibben has selected a roster of thinkers , including Naomi Klein, Priscillia Ludosky and Marie Toussaint, for discussions on topics like sustainable agriculture and food consumption, the role local governments and nongovernmental actors can play in tempering climate change and the relationship between artists, scientists and politicians. Mr. McKibben will moderate each event.

The opportunity to work with French and Francophone intellectuals was intriguing to Mr. McKibben for a number of reasons, he said in an interview . France, he pointed out, “was the site of the Paris climate talks, so its diplomats and leaders developed a fair amount of expertise in thinking through this issue.” The agreement, he added, has “accounted for a fair amount of what form of progress there’s been.”