Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts and Responses will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations, by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversations

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Alison Anderson

Alison Anderson is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Science and Social Work at the University of Plymouth UK. She has a BA (Hons) in Sociology from the University of York and a PhD in ‘The Production of Environmental News’ from the University of Greenwich, and has researched and published extensively on media and environmental risks over the past twenty years. Her most recent co-authored book is Nanotechnology, Risk and Communication (Palgrave, 2009) and her forthcoming book is entitled Media, Environment and the Network Society (Palgrave, 2011). She has guest edited a number of special editions of journals including: Health, Risk and Society; Journal of Risk Research; New Genetics and Society and Sociological Research Online. Her Economic and Social Research Council and British Academy funded research on nanotechnologies is among the first on the social aspects of nanotechnologies in the UK. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Associate Founding Editor of the International Journal of Technoethics, editorial board member of Environmental Communication and Sociology and a founding member of the International Environmental Communication Association.

Peter F. Nardulli

Peter F. Nardulli is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the founding Director of the Cline Center for Democracy, and the editor of a book series with the University of Illinois Press: Democracy, Free Enterprise and the Rule of Law. He has been on the faculty at UIUC since 1974 and served as department head in Political Science from 1992 until 2006. Nardulli is the author of six books on various aspects of the legal process and empirical democratic theory. He has authored a number of articles in journals such at the American Political Science Review, Public Choice, Political Communication, Political Behavior and a number of law reviews. Nardulli is currently directing a global study, the Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID). SID uses a number of technologically advanced, innovative methodologies to examine the impact of political, legal and economic institutions on a wide range of societal development indicators (economic growth, human rights, societal stability, environmental quality, educational attainment etc.). Current projects involve using data from the SID project’s Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project to examine the impact on civil unrest of such things as climate change, natural resources, socio-cultural animosities and political institutions.

Larry Pryor

Larry Pryor has worked as a reporter, writer, editor and photographer, first at the Louisville Courier-Journal and later at the Los Angeles Times. At those publications, he covered the environment and became an assistant metropolitan editor at the Times with responsibility for topics involving science, medicine, urban affairs and the environment. He left journalism to work with Gov. Jerry Brown as press secretary in a presidential campaign and published a novel. He went back to the Times and took part in new media projects there, starting in the 1980s. He became editor of latimes.com, before moving to USC in 1997 to head the Online Journalism and Communications Program at the Annenberg School and to edit the Online Journalism Review. He has since returned to concentrating on environmental journalism. In addition to teaching, he researches topics associated with climate change and public discourse.

Phil Simmons

Phil Simmons has a Bachelor of Agricultural Science from Sydney University and Master of Arts and PhD from Duke University. After his Doctorate he was a Senior Economist at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics in Canberra, Australia. He later joined the School of Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of New England where he became Head of Agricultural & Economics and later Group Leader for Economics. Phil has broad ranging research interests including development where he is the Editor of an international journal in development economics. In the last twelve months his focus has shifted to energy markets and possible alternatives to coal generated electricity. In this area, he is interested in costs of capital in different types of energy markets, especially risk premiums, and using CGE-GTAP models to understand different energy scenarios.