Older people are dreamers too. The Argentine Pope, leader of over a billion people, shakes hands with a girl from Sweden who has mobilised millions of young people (and many less young). Their shared dream is a world in which there is greater brotherhood and solidarity, where architects and engineers have forgotten how to design walls because now they are only asked to build bridges. They want a world in which all human activity – concerning the environment, economics, society, culture and daily life – is directed towards the common good of all people on earth and justice between generations. In a nutshell, they want a world in which “integral ecology” is applied, a key concept in Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical letter “on care for our common home”. Knowing that not everyone has the time to read papal documents or UN reports, Luca Fiorani takes us through the key concepts in Laudato Si’, recent outcomes of international negotiations on climate change and the latest scientific data on the health of our planet.

Luca Fiorani graduated in physics “summa cum laude” in 1990 at the University of Padua, Italy, after research at the US National Accelerator Laboratory (Stanford University) – funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), Geneva, Switzerland. In 1996 he obtained a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. From 1997 to 2000 he worked at the University of Naples, Italy. Since 2000, he has been research scientist at ENEA, the Italian government’s agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development, where he develops laser sensors for environmental parameters and natural phenomena. He is adjunct professor at the LUMSA and Marconi Universities in Rome, and the Sophia University Institute near Florence, Italy. He has authored many articles, patents and texts. He represents Italy on the Arctic Council’s Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment Working Group and chairs the Interest Group on Coastal Zones of the European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories. Since the 1990s, he has been interested in ecology and is coordinator of the interdisciplinary initiative EcoOne (www.ecoone.org) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Catholic Climate Movement. Besides all this, he does an immense amount of work to make science easily understood.