Climate Change & Migration

Katharine Young is Associate Dean for Faculty and Global Programs, Professor, and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. She is also the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Visiting Professor of Law in Spring 2025 at Columbia University. Young is chair of the working group on Climate Change and Migration in the Program on Global Ethics and Social Trust. Young’s research focuses on comparative constitutional law, international human rights law, economic and social rights, and law and gender. She is the author of Constituting Economic and Social Rights (2012) and thirty scholarly articles and book chapters, and editor or co-editor of three major volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights (2023) and The Future of Economic and Social Rights (2019). After law school Young clerked for the Australian High Court, worked as a lawyer with Allens in Melbourne, with the United Nations in Bonn, Germany, with the Legal Resources Centre in Accra, Ghana, and with Paul, Weiss in New York. She completed fellowships with Harvard University’s Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Young received her LL.M. and S.J.D. degrees from Harvard University, and her B.A. and LL.B. from the University of Melbourne 

Vidya Ann Jacob is Assistant Professor at the School of Law, Christ University, in Bangalore, India. She has participated in research projects funded by the Karnataka Government and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She was a member of the Legal Advisory Group to support the Karnataka Biodiversity board 2018-2019. Jacob was a Fulbright-Kalam Climate Doctoral Fellow between 2019 and 2020 at Lewis and Clark Law School, Portland Oregon (USA), where her research focused on how the USA has adopted different climate resilience mechanisms to address climate challenges. Jacob has published articles on areas including climate justice policy for India, climate litigation, marine biodiversity in India, and gender justice & climate change. Her research interests include Human Rights, Urban Development Law, Environmental Law and Climate Change Law and Policy. Jacob received her B.A. LL. B. from Bangalore University, her LL. M. from Christ University, and her PhD from the National School of India University, Bangalore.

Anne McDonald is Professor in the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies and Director of the Island Sustainability Institute at Sophia University in Tokyo. With a mandate to link research to policy development and implementation, she works closely with researchers involved in ecosystem assessments, local and national policy makers and UN conventions related to the environment. She is the former Director of the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies -- Operating Unit Ishikawa/Kanazawa, and since the 1990s has worked on numerous government committees in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Ministry of the Environment and the Prime Minister's Office. Working with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity on marine related issues, at COP10 Nagoya 2010 she co-established the Sustainable Ocean Initiative, an interface between science and policy to strengthen the marine biodiversity elements of the convention. She worked on the Japanese government review team for the IPCC 3rd and 4th Assessment Reports, and is a member of the first national strategy committee for biodiversity for the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF). Raised in Canada and Sweden, she attended Kumamoto University in Japan and graduated from the University of British Columbia.

Oscar Melo is Associate Professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics in the School of Agronomy and Forest Engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago. His research focuses on environmental valuation, climate change, land use, agriculture. and the water-energy-land nexus. The author or co-author of more than 100 articles, he has served as associate editor of the International Journal of Agriculture and Natural Resources. He received a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland, and completed his undergraduate work in agronomy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Noah P. Snyder is Professor and Chair in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College, where he also directed the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program from 2010-2018. His research focuses on river ecology and restoration using fluvial geomorphology, field-based measurements, and remote sensing to measure the short- and long-term responses of rivers to change. The author or co-author of more than forty refereed articles and reports, Snyder’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Harvard Forest. Snyder received his Ph.D. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of Bates College.

Hanqin Tian is Schiller Institute Professor of Global Sustainability, and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, at Boston College. His research and teaching concentrate on the broad area of climate and sustainability sciences, following a data-driven systems approach to understanding, quantifying, and predicting drivers and effects of global-scale changes in the biosphere, climate, and human activity. His interdisciplinary work moves across the fields of ecology, biogeochemistry, hydrology, economics, earth system modeling and data science. This research has resulted in over 300 peer-reviewed journal papers, including 30 papers published in Nature/Science/PNAS and their sister journals. Dr. Tian is a coordinating lead author for the International Nitrogen Assessment and a contributing author for IPCC AR6. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Ecological Society of America. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Biology (Systems Ecology) from State University of New York (SUNY-ESF) and Syracuse University, and holds an M.S. in Agricultural Science from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and a B.S. from Zhejiang University. 

Andrea Vicini, SJ is Chair of the Theology Department and Michael P. Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College. He serves as co-chair of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, and a Fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini. His research interests and publications include biotechnologies, bioethics, environmental issues, global public health, sustainability, and fundamental theological ethics. He is the author of Genetica umana e bene comune (Human Genetics and the Common Good) and dozens of scholarly articles, as well as the editor of six volumes. A member of the Society of Jesus since 1987, Fr. Vicini earned an M.D. (and fellowship in pediatrics) from the University of Bologna, an S.T.D. in Moral Theology from the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of Southern Italy, and a Ph.D in Theological Ethics from Boston College, with additional degrees from the Aloisianum Institute (Padova, Italy), Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome), Centre Sèvres (Paris), and Weston Jesuit School of Theology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). 

Maryanne Loughry is a Sister of Mercy who works with and for refugees worldwide. At Boston College she teaches in the School of Social Work and serves as a senior advisor to the Vice-Provost for Global Engagement. At Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre,  she served from 1996-2004 as the Pedro Arrupe Tutor and is currently a visiting researcher concerned with the psychosocial effects of refugee displacement, with special attention to climate-induced displacement in the Pacific. In Sydney, Australia, she serves as Associate Director of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Australia. Sr. Loughry has worked in detention centers and refugee camps, and conducted program evaluations and humanitarian training in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans, the UK, and most recently in the United States with recent Afghan refugees. In 2010 she was made a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia in recognition of her service to refugees. Dr. Loughry serves on the Governing Committee of the International Catholic Migration Committee (ICMC) and is on the advisory committees of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, University of New South Wales, and the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, University of Melbourne. Her Ph.D is from Flinders University of South Australia.

Theresa S. Betancourt is the Salem Professor in Global Practice at the School of Social Work at Boston College, and Director of the Research Program on Children and Adversity (RPCA). Her central research interests include the developmental and psychosocial consequences of concentrated adversity on children, youth and families; resilience and protective processes in child and adolescent mental health and child development; refugee families; and applied cross-cultural mental health research. She is Principal Investigator of an intergenerational study of war-affected youth in Sierra Leone (LSWAY) and the Youth Readiness Intervention (YRI), in collaboration with the World Bank and Government of Sierra Leone; and she leads RPCA’s implementation research in Rwanda. Bettancourt has written extensively on mental health and resilience in children facing adversity, and her work has been profiled in the New Yorker, National Geographic, NPR, and CNN. She received her Sc.D. in Maternal and Child Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, her M.A. from the University of Louisville, and her B.A. from Linfield College.

Maria Luwalhati (Alu) Dorotan Tiuseco is the Undersecretary of Finance and Head of Climate Finance Policy in the Philippine Department of Finance, and Professor  in the School of Law at the Ateneo de Manila, where she teaches courses in comparative environmental law, constitutional law, and political law. Previous government positions have included service as Chief Legal Counsel and Policy Head for the Senate President and several other Senators; as permanent representative to the Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Presidential Cabinet Cluster; and as Board Secretary of the Metro Manila Council, comprising the 17 mayors of metropolitan Manila. She served as convenor in a number of solid waste, urban renewal, traffic, and international relations programs. She holds an L.L.M. in Energy and Environment from Tulane University Law School, a J.D. from the Ateneo School of Law, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of the Philippines, Manila.