Seminars

Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and 2312. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.

"The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this is an extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis."

Photo credit: Sean Curtin

Aurélie Ceinos, Climate Adaptation Advisor & CARE Climate & Resilience Academy Content Lead
Aurélie is a Climate Adaptation Specialist with 12 years of experience and is part of CARE’s Climate Justice Team. Aurélie has extensive experience with developing and implementing climate adaptation programming in Asia, Africa and Latin America. She is one of the experts who contributed to the design of the CARE Climate & Resilience Academy and to the revision of CARE’s flagship tool on Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (CVCA). She supports and trains CARE teams to integrate climate change into all projects for a better consideration of climate risks. She is passionate about the inter-linkages between gender and climate justice and also how to strengthen our collective voices and actions on climate justice issues.

Karl Deering, Strategic Partnerships Lead - Food and Water Systems Team (CARE USA)
Karl Deering has 23 years of experience in international development and humanitarian work, with a focus on resilience, food security and climate change. Between 2001 and 2005, Karl worked in refugee, displacement and post-conflict crisis management. He has since worked for various NGOs in technical, managerial and policy roles in the areas of humanitarian assistance, food security, climate change and disease control. His core interests are in equity and justice in food systems, gender equality and livelihood-conservation nexus work. He is currently Strategic Partnerships Lead in CARE’s Food and Water Systems team and a member of CARE’s global gender cohort. He has authored several practice, research and policy papers.

Ramón Cruz has over 20 years of experience intersecting the fields of sustainability, environmental policy, urban planning, energy and climate change. He has worked in the public sector in his native Puerto Rico as the Deputy Director of the Environmental Quality Board, the state environmental regulatory agency and as Commissioner of the Puerto Rico Energy Commission.  He has also worked in the non-governmental sector in senior positions at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Partnership for New York City and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).  

In May 2020, he was elected President of the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organization with 3.8 million members and supporters in 64 chapters across the United States.        

Ramón is a graduate of American University in Washington D.C. and Princeton University in New Jersey.      

Julie Sze is a Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research focuses on environmental justice and inequalities, the relationship between social movements and policy implementation, and the areas of public and environmental humanities at the intersection of three interdisciplinary fields: environmental, urban and ethnic studies from the vantage point of American Studies.

Professor Sze is the author of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015), and, most recently, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (University of California Press, 2020). Across a wide geographical terrain (New York, California and Shanghai) and scales and issues, Professor Sze's research holds constant a sustained focus on political ecology, urbanization, and planning, including links and interactions between the political economy of spatial form and social relations with nature.

The Honourable Mia Mottley is the 8th Prime Minister of Barbados. She became the first woman to occupy the high office, following General Elections on May 24th 2018, in which she led the Barbados Labour Party to an emphatic victory, winning all 30 seats in the House of Assembly by the largest margin ever seen in the electoral history of the country.

An Attorney-at-Law and Queen’s Counsel, Prime Minister Mottley has been active in the political life of Barbados for almost three decades. First elected in 1994 she is presently serving her sixth term as Member of Parliament for the constituency of St. Michael North East.

Between 1994 and 2008 Miss Mottley served in the Cabinet of three successive Administrations, first as Minister of Education and Culture; then as Attorney-General and Minister of Home Affairs; and then as Minister of Economic Affairs. In 2003 she was appointed Deputy Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Mottley currently also holds the portfolios of Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs and Investment.

Since becoming Prime Minister, Miss Mottley has served as the Chair of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) between January 1st and June 30th, 2020. Notwithstanding that, Miss Mottley, as Prime Minister of Barbados, serves as the Lead Head of Government within CARICOM, bearing responsibility for the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).

Prime Minister Mottley also serves as Co-Chair of the Americas Cruise Tourism Task Force for the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America markets.