Simona Capisani is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Durham University (UK) and the Faculty Lead for Arts and Humanities for Durham University’s Centre for Sustainable Development Law & Policy at Durham Law School. She specializes in political philosophy, ethics (normative and applied), climate justice, international climate governance, and environmental politics. Her current work addresses moral, political, legal, and policy-focused questions of climate-related mobilities. Her research also includes a focus on moral and political issues related to loss and damage, climate adaptation, conservation, geoengineering, community engagement in climate transitions, and international climate law and governance.

Prior to joining the Department of Philosophy at Durham University, Simona wa a postdoctoral research scholar at Princeton University in the Center for Human Values and High Meadows Environmental Institute’s Climate Futures Initiative, and previously a research fellow at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.

She currently serves as one of the organizing officers for the International Society for Environmental Ethics and is on the steering committee for Philosophers for Sustainability.

You can find out more about Simona at https://www.simonacapisani.com/

Anna Stilz is the Kernan Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her research interests include the history of political thought (particularly Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx); democratic theory; nationalism; political obligation, authority, and state legitimacy; rights to sovereignty and territory; the ethics of migration and borders; climate change and climate justice; and theories of collective agency and collective responsibility. She is the author of Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (2009), and Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (2019), and many journal articles in political philosophy. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy and Public Affairs.

DescriptDr. Jola Ajibade is an Associate Professor and scholar-activist in the Environmental Sciences Department at Emory University. Her scholarship advances justice-centered approaches to climate adaptation, relocation, community resilience, and future city planning. Specifically, she explores how climate change impacts and adaptation programs are transforming the lives, livelihoods, socio-cultural landscapes, and housing access for historically marginalized communities. As an urban political ecologist, Dr. Ajibade is dedicated to identifying innovative, effective, and equitable approaches to the climate crises and proposed solutions. She integrates environmental justice and antiracist lenses as well as feminist decolonial praxis and care ethics, in her approach to these challenges. Throughout her scholarly work, Jola emphasizes the importance of striving for just transformations in a changing climate. This involves advocating for disruptive and positive shifts in the global political economy, human behavior, land use patterns, tree distribution, housing, energy use, disaster management, and water security. Dr. Ajibade holds a PhD in Geography and Environmental Sustainability from Western University, Canada. Her work has been featured in many academic journals and media outlets, including Nature, Science, NPR, Al Jazeera, Science Friday, Yale Environment 360, Science, New Internationalist, and Vice. She co-edited the book titled “Global Views on Climate Relocation and Social Justice.” Published by Routledge in 2022.ion goes here

Hélène Benveniste is an Assistant Professor in the Global Environmental Policy unit of the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She works on international environmental policy and politics, with focuses on climate-related human migration and global governance of environmental issues. In her research, she uses both quantitative and qualitative methods drawn from political and other social sciences. Her work has appeared in scientific journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Climate Change. Prior to joining Stanford, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. She holds a Ph.D. in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Ingrid Boas is an associate professor at the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University. She conducts research on the subject of environmental change and human mobility, focusing on the everyday, trans-local and geopolitical realities characterizing this relation. She is in particular well known for her efforts in bringing forward a collective research agenda on environmental and climate mobilities, which recently also translated into an international collaborative Environmental Climate Mobilities Network (ECMN). Currently her focus is to further study the political and power dimensions of climate im/mobilities. This is informed by two research programmes that she is leading: The first is on climate mobilities in the Bengal, West African, and Pacific borderlands, funded through a personal VIDI grant by the Dutch Scientific Organisation. The second is on mobile forms of cultural heritage in relation to the impacts of climate change (projects) for (semi-)nomadic indigenous livelihoods, funded through the Belmont Forum and JPI Climate and done in collaboration with Mahidol University and University of Vienna, and other project partners in the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Thailand, Austria, and Senegal.

Barbara Buckinx is Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. She received her PhD in Politics from Princeton University and also holds MA and MSc degrees in Psychology and Social and Political Theory, both from the University of Edinburgh.

Her research interests lie in global governance, migration, refugees, citizenship, and borders. Her teaching interests also include the environment and gender. Her work has appeared in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, PS: Political Science & Politics, Migration Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric.

She is co-editor of Domination and Global Political Justice: Conceptual, Historical, and Institutional Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and is completing a monograph that investigates the problem of the unrestrained and potential exercise of power in global politics. In her monograph as well as her work more generally, Dr Buckinx aims to reconcile the divide between normative political theory and policy research and give guidance to scholars as well as policy makers on what to allow, what to prohibit, and how to target reform in global governance.

She is co-chair of The Global Justice Network and a member of the Global Health Impact's Pandemic Health Equity Working Group and the Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group. She also chairs the selection committee for the annual Jonathan Trejo-Mathys Essay Prize, which is co-sponsored by The Global Justice Network and the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. At LISD, she is the Project Lead for the Project on Self-Determination, the Environment, and Migration, and the Project on Gender in the Global Community.

Brianna Castro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Climate Studies Program at Vanderbilt University. Her interdisciplinary, ethnographic research considers the social effects of climate change in everyday life. She considers the spectrum of responses to climate change effects from adaptation in place to mobility across distinct global contexts. Brianna is working on her first book about how climate change is reshaping everyday life using ethnographic data from Colombia, Nigeria, and the United States. Her work appears in Global Environmental Change, One Earth, Ecology and Society, and Qualitative Sociology among other outlets.

Before joining Vanderbilt University, Brianna was a postdoctoral fellow conducting research on adaptation through youth service programs for the US National Parks Service and the US Forest Service. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and a BA in Public Policy Analysis and Spanish Language and Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brianna also served in the US Peace Corps in rural Colombia and worked extensively as a community development practitioner in the rural South before pursuing her PhD.

Personal website: briannacastro.com

University website: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/sociology/bio/brianna-castro/

Nicolas Coquette-Levy graduated from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs' Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program in 2022. His research focuses on policy and governance frameworks for promoting resilient climate adaptation among the worlds’ 500 million smallholder farming households. He is working with Professor Michael Oppenheimer from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Professor Simon Levin from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Nicolas seek to integrate insights from diverse methods in my work, including agent-based modelling, game theory, survey research, and robust decision-making frameworks. Some of the questions he is currently researching include:

-What factors influence smallholder farming households’ decisions regarding livelihood decisions under increasing climate risk?

-In particular, what is the relationship between rural-urban migration and other strategies for adapting to climate change? How do different policy, climate, and institutional settings impact households’ decision-making regarding these strategies?

-How can policymakers at local and global scales design incentives to promote resilient climate adaptation among smallholder farmers?

Before coming to Princeton, Nicolas obtained undergraduate degrees in Biomedical Engineering and International Relations from the University of Southern California, and a Master's degree in Energy and Environmental Systems from the University of Calgary (Canada). For his Master's thesis, he modeled the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and economics of multiple oil sands production technologies, in order to assess the impact of potential carbon taxes on industry and government decision-making.

After earning his Master's, he worked for six years in a variety of sustainable development roles in the Canadian oil and gas industry, including sustainability reporting, environmental and social risk assessment, and technology evaluation.

Sara Constantino is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Marine and Environmental Sciences, and the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University. She works on social and environmental policy and decision-making. Her research focuses on understanding the interplay between individual, institutional and ecological factors on beliefs and values, policy, and resilience to extreme events or shocks. In recent studies, she has looked at the role of polarization, social norms and governance in stimulating or stifling support for climate action. She is currently conducting field work on the Gulf Coast on the role of neighborhood-based associations, including homeowner associations, in shaping how risks are locally distributed through adaptation and relocation policies. In this work, she also examines the dynamics that result when communities are displaced due to development or extreme events. She also works on the impacts and politics of basic income programs, and is evaluating the largest municipal program in Compton, CA.

Prior to starting at Northeastern, she was an associate research scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a lecturer at the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Before this, she was senior research fellow in guaranteed income with the Jain Family Institute and a founding editor at Nature Human Behavior. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics from McGill University, a master’s degree in economics from University College London, and a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences, with a focus on learning and decision-making in dynamic environments, from New York University.

Jamie Draper is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. From September 2023, he will be an Assistant Professor at the Ethics Institute in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His work focuses on climate change, migration, and displacement, and his recent articles have been published in journals such as the European Journal of Political Theory, American Political Science Review, and Political Studies. He is currently working on a book, Climate Displacement, to be published with Oxford University Press.

Carol Farbotko is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. A cultural geographer interested in place, culture, politics and mobility, her research examines how these are changing in a changing climate.

Colin Hickey is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. His primary research focuses on climate ethics, global justice, and bioethics. He is currently working on projects about distributing climate burdens fairly, climate activism, public health and adaptation strategies, and climate displacement. Colin received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Georgetown University and previously held postdocs at Princeton University and Utrecht University.

Roman Hoffmann leads the Migration and Sustainable Development Research Group (MIG) at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Vienna, Austria, and degrees in sociology and economics from the University of Munich, Germany. In his applied research, he studies the relationship between environmental change processes and population dynamics and the resulting implications for sustainable development. In particular, his work focuses on investigating the underlying causes, patterns, and consequences of different types of migration, with an emphasis on the links between climate change and human mobility.

Nathan Jessee is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Environmental Fellow at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute. Nathan’s work is focused on disaster and development-forced displacement, colonial and racial capitalist development, and struggles for environmental and climate justice in the Mississippi River Delta. He is co-author of a forthcoming book under contract with Palgrave Macmillan about how the colonial and racialized U.S. property regime comes to bear on Indigenous community resettlement planning efforts in the wake of extreme weather and is currently completing a solo-authored manuscript about how the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation’s long-standing efforts to resettle as “an act of cultural survival” were transformed by international media attention and government investment. This work situates emerging debates about climate change policy and planning, in particular interventions focused on human mobility and adaptation, within the long durée of geographic change, development, ecocide, and Indigenous-led advocacy on the Gulf Coast. You can also find Nathan’s writing published in Political Ecology, Human Organization, and elsewhere.

Liz Koslov is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Environment and Sustainability, and Sociology at UCLA. Her research brings an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach to analyzing struggles over space and place in the context of climate change, with a focus on managed retreat. She is currently writing a book, Retreat, about community organizing for home buyouts among coastal property owners after Hurricane Sandy. Her published work includes articles in Public Culture, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Annual Review of Sociology, and other outlets, as well as the collectively authored book, People or Property: Legal Contradictions, Climate Resettlement, and the View from Shifting Ground. Before joining UCLA, Dr. Koslov was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She holds a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, an MSc in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics, and a BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literatures from the George Washington University.

Woi Sok (Woi) Oh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His research bridges the dynamics of humans, nature, infrastructure, and institutions as coupled systems using quantitative approaches from complex system science. He focuses on analyzing system resilience and establishing sustainable management in coupled natural-human systems. These days, he is particularly interested in human migration/displacement/mobility issues in the relationship with climate and conflict. To solve knowledge gaps, he uses complex system models, network analysis, and causal inference.

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and Director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Oppenheimer has been an author of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, since its First Assessment Report (1990). Oppenheimer is coeditor-in-chief of the journal Climatic Change. He is a science advisor to the Environmental Defense Fund and member of several boards of directors including the Board of the Trust for Governors Island (NYC), the future site of a major climate science research and education center focused on solutions to the climate problem. He is a Heinz Award winner and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Oppenheimer’s current research focuses on sea level rise, coastal flooding, and other impacts of climate change, and human responses including migration. Much of his work has centered on defining the concept of “dangerous” climate change, a key aspect of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.

Oppenheimer is the author of over 200 articles published in professional journals and is co-author (with Robert H. Boyle) of a 1990 book, Dead Heat: The Race against the Greenhouse Effect. He is also coauthor of the book Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, published in 2019 by the University of Chicago Press. He has an SB degree from MIT in chemistry (1966) and a PhD from the University of Chicago in chemical physics (1970). He joined the Princeton faculty in 2002 after more than two decades with the Environmental Defense Fund (1981-2002), where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. Before joining the EDF staff, he was a postdoctoral fellow and then an Atomic and Molecular Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1971-1981).

Romy Opperman is originally from London, UK and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Romy’s research centers on Africana, Indigenous, decolonial feminist thinkers to foreground issues of racism and colonialism for environmental and climate ethics and justice. Her recent work has reconceptualized the intergenerational problems of climate justice through a Black feminist lens; outlined a framework for anti-nuclear anti-colonialism; and explored the ongoing significance of racism for the planetary. A second related research trajectory puts pressure on debates around climate migration and mobilities by adopting the decolonial frame of pluriversal politics in tandem with anarchist strands of Black feminist thought and climate practice. Finally, a third project looks at Sylvia Wynter’s early work and shows she repurposes insights from T. W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin to construct a distinctive Caribbean critical theory. Romy’s work has appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review, Critical Philosophy of Race, March: A Journal of Art & Strategy, The Philosopher, and Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal. She is currently writing a book manuscript tentatively titled Groundings: Black Ecologies of Freedom.

Linda Shi is Associate Professor at Cornell University’s Department of City and Regional Planning. She studies how urban land governance shapes vulnerability to climate impacts and how to promote climate adaptations that help repair environmental justice and ecological systems. Her current research examines how changes to land use, property rights, and disaster policy can help communities adapt in place, relocate, or migrate. She has a PhD in urban and regional planning from MIT.

Melissa Oberon Tier is a PhD candidate at the Princeton School of Public & International Affairs in the Science, Technology, & Environmental Policy program. Her research on climate adaptation policy interweaves topics in multi-level governance, environmental justice, urban planning, and behavioral science.

Melissa is actively involved in a number of community-based and co-produced initiatives, including via the regional Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH) and NYC Resilient Coastal Communities Project. She co-teaches an Environmental Justice course with the NJ Prison Teaching Initiative, and previously worked as a Graduate Fellow at both the NYC Mayor's Office of Climate & Environmental Justice and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). At Princeton, she is a member of the Center for Policy Research on Energy & the Environment, the Behavioral Science for Policy Lab, and the SPIA in NJ initiative.

Before joining the Princeton community, Melissa served for 5 years as the first Sustainability Program Manager at Swarthmore College, PA, helping to launch the Office of Sustainability and to facilitate environmental and climate institutional decision-making. She holds an MSc in Sustainable Urban Development from the University of Oxford and a BA in Psychology from Swarthmore.

Personal website

Princeton profile

Lisa Thalheimer is a climate economist with a focus on the impacts of climate change and resulting human responses including migration and conflict. She is a Senior Researcher at the United Nations University - Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). She completed her postdoctoral research at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. She is an associate researcher with Climate Econometrics, the World Weather Attribution initiative and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and part of the RISK-KAN steering committee.

Her research focuses on three pillars: effect, causality, and interventions. Her research seeks to disentangle the underlying drivers of human (im)mobility and attribute extreme weather-driven human mobility to anthropogenic climate change. Her research interests include anticipatory action, compound events, and systemic risk. Thalheimer co-leads the CLON Project that aims to better understand climate change impacts on (im)mobility and conflict.

Dr. Thalheimer received her DPhil (PhD) from the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, and a MS in Sustainability Management from Columbia University. Her doctoral research developed a method to quantitatively assess the contribution of climate change to human mobility, combining methods from climate science and econometrics. Prior to joining UNU, she worked in a variety of roles at international organizations and NGOs such as the World Bank and The Earth Institute, providing her with a multifaceted, international background in environmental economics and climate policy.

Website: https://lisathalheimer.github.io/

Dr. Kira Vinke is head of the Center for Climate and Foreign Policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

She also co-chairs the Advisory Board to the German Federal Government on Civilian Crisis Prevention and Peacebuilding. From 2014-2022, she worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Before joining DGAP, she headed the East Africa Peru India Climate Capacities (EPICC) project there.

Until 2018, Vinke was a research analyst to the director of PIK. In this capacity, she worked from 2014 to 2016 as an analyst for the German Advisory Council on Global Change to the Federal Government (WBGU). She provided her expertise as a consultant for the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and the Asian Development Bank. She has extensive field research experience in South Asia, the Pacific, and the Sahel.

Vinke completed her doctoral dissertation (summa cum laude) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the subject of climate change and migration; her studies were funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. For her dissertation, she received the “Potsdamer Nachwuchswissenschaftler-Preis,” a prize for young scientists, from the city of Potsdam.

Vinke has been a member of the advisory board of Germany’s Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS) since 2022. She is also a member of the board of trustees of the German Climate Foundation (Deutsche KlimaStiftung) and of the World Vision Deutschland e.V. In addition, Vinke is a member of the German section of “Aktion gegen den Hunger” (Action Against Hunger), and the Development Service and Humanitarian Aid Committee of “Brot für die Welt” (bread for the world).

Languages : German, English, Spanish, Portuguese

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth System Science, the Department of Environmental Social Sciences, and a Center Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research focuses on applying behavioral decision research methods to address challenges associated with global environmental change. Dr. Wong-Parodi seeks to understand the psychosocial and contextual factors that influence people’s responses to environmental change – especially extremes – over time, with a particular focus on those communities that have been historically marginalized or disproportionately impacted by climate change. She also uses behavioral decision science approaches to create and evaluate evidence-based strategies for informed decision making, with a particular focus on building resilience and promoting sustainability in the face of a changing climate. Dr. Wong-Parodi has a background in climate change adaptation and mitigation, energy technologies and resources, extreme weather events, and low-carbon technologies. Dr. Wong-Parodi received her B.A. in Psychology, M.A. in Risk Perceptions and Communication, and Ph.D. in Risk Perceptions and Communication from the University of California, Berkeley.

Merewalesi Yee recently attained her PhD from the University of Queensland in Australia. Merewalesi’s PhD project focused on indigenous communities in Fiji, delving into their lived experiences in the context of climate (im)mobility. Merewalesi has over 15 years of teaching experience in Fiji and the Pacific region. Over the past five years, Merewalesi has been deeply engaged in research activities in Fiji, exploring themes such as voluntary immobility, planned relocation, non-economic loss and damage, disaster risk reduction, and place-belongingness. Merewalesi aims to continue to contribute to the development of culturally appropriate solutions for addressing the complex challenges of climate change, displacement, loss and damage, and gender inequality in the Pacific. Utilising indigenous research methodologies tailored to the cultural context of the Pacific Islands region, her work emphasises community engagement and collaboration with a diverse array of stakeholders. This approach includes government agencies, civil society organizations, and affected communities.n goes here