EXPERTS ADVISORY

ANN ARBOR—Several University of Michigan faculty experts are available to discuss Pope Francis’ views on climate change and sustainable development and the significance of his upcoming addresses to Congress and a U.N. sustainability summit. They are:

Andrew Hoffman, education director at the Graham Sustainability Institute, who wrote three posts about the pope’s encyclical on the environment for The Conversation. Hoffman can also field questions about the social debate over climate change and why some people reject the scientific consensus. Hoffman is the Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, a position with joint appointments at the Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

Contact: 734-763-9455, 617-285-0920 (cell phone), [email protected]

Knute Nadelhoffer is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the U-M Biological Station in Pellston, Mich. In a Sept. 23 op-ed in the Detroit Free Press, co-written with Rev. Charles Morris of Madonna University in Livonia, Nadelhoffer said that “we join with Pope Francis in encouraging people of goodwill, regardless of faith, to participate in constructive conversations and take actions to solve the climate crisis and address basic human needs. We hope Congress listens and acts.”

Read the full op-ed: myumi.ch/6j10V
Contact: 734-647-2620, [email protected]

Maria Carmen Lemos, professor of natural resources and environment, is an expert on the human dimensions of climate change, especially the intersection between development and adaptation, and the role of science in building adaptive capacity to climate impacts. She is a co-founder of Icarus, the Initiative on Climate Adaptation Research and Understanding through the Social Sciences. Lemos served on the U.S. National Research Council’s Board on Environmental Change and Society and on NRC panels that produced the reports “Restructuring federal climate research to meet the challenges of climate change” and “America’s climate choices.”

Contact: 734-764-9315, [email protected]

Arun Agrawal is a professor of natural resources and environment. He was a lead author of the livelihoods and poverty chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 report on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

Agrawal’s expertise lies in the political economics of development, environmental governance, resource use and management, climate adaptation and institutional analysis. He is editor-in-chief of World Development, a multidisciplinary journal of development studies and coordinator of the International Forest Resources and Institutions Network, a two-decade-old, multi-country research effort on community-managed forests.

Contact: 734-647-5948, [email protected]

Brian Porter-Szücs is a professor of history and an expert in Roman Catholicism. In a recent interview, he said the pope is a true conservative, both in society issues as well as economic and environmental ones.

“His position on social justice questions are far to the left of really anything that any major American politician is advocating right now,” he said. “He is quite critical of capitalism as such and his most recent encyclical, although mainly about the environment and about the dangers of global warming, link that with the broader economic structure of the capitalist world which he describes as unsustainable and basically immoral and un-Christian.”

Contact: 734-330-2626, [email protected]