Climate Is Every Story
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We must never forget that the natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity, and the responsibility of everyone.
鈥 Pope Francis, Laudato Si鈥, 2015
Series Overview
鈥淐limate Is Every Story鈥 is a year-long event series that seeks to foster an ongoing dialogue about covering the climate crisis among leading journalists and Boston College鈥檚 faculty and students.
The World Meteorological Organization reported in March 2025 that the past 10 years on earth have been the hottest 10 years in almost 200 years of record-keeping. Which means that right now, there is no news story bigger than our fast-warming climate. It is global, geopolitical, existential, and rapidly evolving. Most journalists who cover climate do so as a beat 鈥 they chronicle the persistent rises in global temperatures, the cascading natural disasters, the political battles over clean 男女操逼视频软件 and emissions, and the ever-more-dire United Nations reports. But climate change has seeped into every facet of modern life: How we work, what we eat, how we invest, where we build, and, in the case of the most vulnerable, how we survive. Which is to say, it鈥檚 outgrown any single journalistic beat. It is inextricable now from most disciplines, from the economy and business development to culture, food systems, immigration, and so on. Simply put: Climate is every beat; every beat is climate.
And yet: Covering the climate crisis grows more challenging by the day. Even as climate impacts are spreading, the media environment is becoming increasingly precarious. Between media layoffs and the proliferation of 鈥渘ews deserts鈥 鈥 or regions without reliable local news sources 鈥 it鈥檚 getting harder for newsrooms to adequately cover climate stories. Last summer, in a survey conducted by the Earth Journalism Network, 76 percent of environmental journalists reported that their coverage was limited by a lack of resources. The report recommended that individual journalists 鈥渘eed the support of their newsrooms to specialize in environmental journalism and break down barriers between beats, allowing journalists across the organization to cover climate change and its effects.鈥澨
We know that journalism shapes the decisions of individuals, communities, companies, policymakers, and governments as they navigate an uncertain future. And we know that a lack of informed and insightful journalism about climate change has broad-reaching impacts on communities and society at large. But we believe that the future of climate journalism is a conversation that reaches far beyond journalists. And we believe Boston College can be a place that both inspires and informs that conversation.听
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Public Health, Common Good
October 1, 2025 | 12:00pm-1:00pm听|听
Schiller Institute Convening Space (Room 501), 245 Beacon
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Moderated by Patrick McGroarty (鈥06), Economy Editor, The New York Times
The Panel Features:
Journalist Jason Beaubien, National Public Radio Correspondent;
Professor Summer Hawkins, School of Social Work and Associate Director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good; and
Professor Praveen Kumar, School of Social Work.

Patrick McGroarty
Patrick McGroarty is economy editor at The New York Times. He helps lead a team of reporters in New York and Washington covering every aspect of the American economy. Previously, McGroarty spent 16 years at The Wall Street Journal, most recently as Health & Medicine bureau chief. Before that, he was deputy bureau chief in Chicago and a reporter based in Johannesburg and Berlin. He graduated from Boston College in 2006 and started his career at the Dorchester Reporter before moving to Germany on a Fulbright scholarship in 2007.
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Jason Beaubien
Jason Beaubien is a Peabody award-winning journalist and writer. He鈥檚 reported stories from more than 60 countries around the world for National Public Radio. His work has focused primarily on issues affecting low-income countries, specifically the impacts of natural disasters and armed conflicts. Early in his career, he covered local news in San Francisco and Boston. Beaubien later served as NPR鈥檚 Africa Correspondent, Mexico City Bureau Chief, and as the network鈥檚 Global Health and Development Correspondent. He now lives in Keene, New Hampshire, where he launched a local daily news podcast called KeeneCast. Beaubien continues to teach writing, journalism, and podcasting.

Summer Sherburne Hawkins
Summer Sherburne Hawkins is a professor at the Boston College School of Social Work and the Associate Director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good. She is a social epidemiologist with an interest in addressing policy-relevant research questions in women鈥檚 and children鈥檚 health. Her research examines the impact of policies on health disparities in women and children by evaluating natural experiments created through policy changes within and between US states, including policies related to substance use and reproductive health. She received her PhD from the University of London and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health before joining Boston College in 2012.
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Praveen Kumar
Dr. Praveen Kumar is an Associate Professor at the Boston College School of Social Work. His research focuses on the human dimensions of climate and environment in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. He examines adaptations that address the health and well-being of populations vulnerable to climate and environmental risks. He is an engineer-turned-social scientist. He received his PhD in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a McDonnell International Scholar. Before his PhD, he worked as a management consultant for KPMG in India, primarily in its Climate Change and Sustainability Services Practice.
The Climate Crisis is Local News
November 12, 2025 | 12:00pm-1:00pm听|听
Schiller Institute Convening Space (Room 501), 245 Beacon
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Moderated by听Amber Williams, 男女操逼视频软件'10, senior editor at The New York Times
The Panel Features:
Sabrina Shankman, Boston Globe;
Catherine Hoar,听Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering, Boston College;
Professor Yi Ming, Schiller Institute, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Boston College;
Neil McCullagh,听Executive Director, Carroll School of Management鈥檚 Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action, Lecturer at Boston College.

Amber Williams
Amber Williams, 男女操逼视频软件 '10, is a senior editor at The New York Times, on a team at the center of the newsroom called the News Desk that helps to set news priorities, vet stories, coordinate coverage and work with the home page. She was a founding editor of The New York Times for Kids, which she led for six years as editorial director, and edited the second and third pages of the physical newspaper.
Prior to joining The Times, Amber was an editor at Scientific American, where she ran Advances, the magazine鈥檚 news section. She was also an editor at Popular Science and has worked at Wired and Audubon Magazine. Amber received her master鈥檚 degree from New York University as part of the science, health and environmental reporting program and studied biology and English at Boston College, where she worked in a lab extracting mRNA from shrimp that had been dead for a very long time.

Sabrina Shankman
Sabrina Shankman covers the climate crisis for the Boston Globe. She joined the newspaper in 2021 after reporting for eight years at Inside Climate News, where she covered the arctic. Prior to that, she helped produce shows for PBS/Frontline and reported for ProPublica. She has reported on polar bear attacks from a helicopter, stayed in man-camps on Alaska鈥檚 North Slope and tracked the path of a terrorist through India and Denmark. At the Globe, her work helps readers understand climate change-fueled extreme weather events, the emerging science and policy of climate change, and the work being done at the state and regional level to address the crisis. Her work has won national recognition, including from the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Headliner Awards, and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She got her start as a crime reporter at the Taunton Daily Gazette, and has a masters in journalism from U.C. Berkeley.

Catherine Hoar
Catherine Hoar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at Boston College. Her work interrogates wastewater and wastewater treatment systems to detect contaminants, understand their fate, and improve their removal. Dr. Hoar鈥檚 research interests include wastewater surveillance of emerging pathogens, biological wastewater treatment processes, and biodegradation of emerging contaminants in natural and engineered systems. Prior to joining 男女操逼视频软件, Catherine worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Earth and Environmental Engineering from Columbia University.

Yi Ming
Yi Ming is the Institute Professor of Climate Science and Society and Professor of Earth andEnvironmental Sciences at Boston College. Dr. Ming uses climate models, observations andtheories to elucidate the physical mechanisms governing Earth鈥檚 climate system and applies thefundamental understanding to practical issues of societal and policy importance. He has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, and mentored a number of Ph.D. students and postdocs.
His honors include the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers(PECASE), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Norbert Gerbier-Mumm International Award, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Henry G. Houghton Award, and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Ascent Award. Previously, Dr. Ming was a Senior Scientist and Divisional Leader at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). He was also a faculty member of the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) at Princeton University. Dr. Ming holds a B.E. in Chemical Engineering (with a second B.E. in Environmental Engineering) from Tsinghua University (1998) and a Ph.D. in Civil and EnvironmentalEngineering from Princeton University (2003).

Neil McCullagh
Neil McCullagh is Executive Director of the Carroll School of Management鈥檚 Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action and a Lecturer at Boston College. Neil leads the Center鈥檚 activities related to curriculum development, student engagement, and community outreach.
Neil has experience in private and nonprofit sectors, including extensive domestic and international expertise directing high-impact social change initiatives. Neil has led multiyear community development, economic development, and housing programs. This dynamic experience informs his teaching at Boston College, where his courses focus on analyzing the factors critical to the successful transformation of urban neighborhoods and giving students "learning by doing" experiences, including in the Corcoran Centers Urban Action Lab, which tackles current challenges in housing, community, and economic development with partners across the region.
Before joining Boston College, Neil was the Executive Director of The American City Coalition(TACC), which provided place-based support to community-based organizations focused on revitalization efforts in Boston. He served as Country Director for CHF International (now Global Communities) in Azerbaijan on a multi-year democracy and governance program. He co-directed operations of a private sector development program in Mongolia and led all aspects of a reconstruction and refugee resettlement program in post-war Kosovo.
Neil holds an undergraduate degree from Boston College, an MBA from Boston University, and an MPA from Harvard University鈥檚 Kennedy School of Government. He was awarded a Roy and Lila Ash Fellowship for Innovations in Democracy and Governance and was a Jesuit Volunteer in JVC Southwest.
Forced Migration and Changing Communities
More to come!
The Business of Climate
More to come!