Pardee Center and OCIS Co-Host Second Roundtable on Faith and Climate Change
On September 19 and 20, 2024, the Pardee Center and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) co-hosted a two-day Roundtable at Boston University exploring the moral dimensions of climate action and the possible role of faith-based values in encouraging positive environmental and climate behaviors – particularly in the context of Islam and Muslim societies.
The Roundtable brought together a diverse group of 18 participants, including researchers, practitioners, community activists, policymakers, and journalists.
On the afternoon of September 19, the Pardee Center, OCIS, and the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs (CURA) co-hosted a public panel discussion, which was open to the BU community and beyond. The event featured İbrahim Özdemir (Uskudar University, Turkey), Afreen Siddiqi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology), and was moderated by Pardee School of Global Studies Dean Emeritus Adil Najam.
The Roundtable was the second event in a future-oriented, interdisciplinary, and structured research initiative to explore the moral dimensions of climate action and the possible role of faith-based values in encouraging positive environmental and climate behaviors – particularly in the context of Islam and Muslim societies. As part of this initiative, OCIS and the Pardee Center co-hosted a Roundtable at Oxford in May 2024.
The initiative is co-led by Prof. Adil Najam, a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow (2024-26) and the Mahathir Mohamad Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies and by Prof. Shahid Jameel, the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Fellow at OCIS and head of OCIS’s Program on Science, Technology, and Environment in Muslim Societies. The goal of the initiative is to produce a policy paper that identifies a research agenda on faith and climate change and outlines some next steps towards its realization (expected early 2025).