Joanna Carey Featured on Climate Panel at CIEE Conference in Rome
Associate Professor of Environmental Science Joanna Carey represented Babson College in Rome recently at the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Study Abroad Conference.
Carey—also the Debi and Andy Butler Term Chair in the Mathematics, Analytics, Science, and Technology Division—spoke as one of five experts at the opening plenary session on the theme of “Leading Change in a Changing Climate” at the conference in November.
Carey’s appearance at the CIEE conference was supported through a collaboration with Babson’s Glavin Office of International Education, and she was joined at the conference by John Crisafulli, director of education abroad at Babson, and Bingqing Zhou, advisor of education abroad.
The panel discussion, “The Science of Climate Change and the Art of Transformative Action,” was moderated by Alan Masters, CIEE academic director for curriculum quality and development.
Carey’s research focuses on elemental cycling along the land-ocean continuum; one of her main research topics examines how human activity, including climate change, alters the amount of silicon exported from terrestrial to aquatic systems. In her opening remarks, Carey detailed extensive evidence of the unprecedented rate of change of carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere, noting that the past 10 years have been the warmest 10 years on record. She also made the case to take collective action to combat the worsening problem.
“There is evidence that we need a stable earth system for humanity to thrive,” she said at the end of her opening remarks. “We are working on climate change, not necessarily for the Earth’s sake; the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and has proven resilient to mass disruptions in climate over time, but thriving human civilizations require clean air, clean water, and food to feed 8 billion of us. We are only going to address climate change effectively by thinking about international collaboration, because the atmosphere has no international boundaries.”
Carey was joined on the panel by Matthew Alford, professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego; Max Boykoff, professor, University of Colorado–Boulder; Rishi Sugla, climate resilience scientist with Climate Impacts Group, University of Washington; and Steph Tai, associate dean, University of Wisconsin Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Watch the entire opening session that featured Carey here:
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