During St. Thomas University’s (STU) inaugural International Conference on Climate, Nature and Society, business leaders, high school students, innovators and academics gathered to hear leading experts tackle the science and social impact of global climate change.
Pope Francis’s right-hand man on climate change, and President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, closed the conference speaking to a standing room only crowd about our social responsibility to mobilize and curb climate change. Cardinal Turkson, who helped draft the eco-encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care For Our Common Home,” also participated in a Q&A session after his presentation.
Laudato Si’ is the first papal encyclical in the 2,000 year history of the Catholic Church devoted solely to environmental issues highlighting the crisis posed by climate change, and our collective responsibility to pass along a clean and safe planet to future generations.
Father Alfred Cioffi, the Florida Blue endowed chair in bioethics and director of STU’s Institute for Bioethics, said the conference educated, but more importantly, unleashed actions or ideas to curb global climate change.
Other speakers included: Dr. Richard Muller, astrophysicist from the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Earth Institute; Dr. John Van Leer, physical oceanographer at University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science; Dr. Chris Langdon, marine biologist at University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science; Dr. Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, computational social scientist at George Mason University; and Greg Hamra, sustainability educator.
For the full text of his speech, click here. For photos of Cardinal Turkson at the conference, click here.
The two-day conference, which took place on Feb. 18-19, was spearheaded by STU’s Institute for Bioethics.
