The Institut d'Història de la Ciència secures a new ERC Advanced Grant

The new ERC Advanced Grant project at the Institute for the History of Science (IHC) is titled The Catholic Church and the Environment (CATCH) and is led by Dr. Marco Armiero* (ICREA Senior Researcher at IHC-UAB). The project will run for five years and has a total budget of €2.5 million.

This project will offer the first environmental history of the Catholic Church and shed light on its influence on environmental visions, policies, and realities. “Scholars have explored the intersection of religion and the environment from theological and philosophical perspectives, but historical relationships have remained largely unexamined. This oversight is significant, given the global influence of the Catholic Church, including its participation in major environmental conferences and its potential impact on 1.5 billion people,” notes the researcher. The project will cover the period from the 1960s—when the Second Vatican Council aligned with the environmental hopes of that era—through to the 2000s and the election of Pope Francis, who has positioned the Church as a vocal actor in the fight against climate change.

The study will address the environmental engagement of the Catholic Church at multiple scales. At the global level, it will examine the Church’s role in environmental governance through its involvement in international conferences and UN debates. Regionally, the project will investigate its engagement via case studies in South and North America (Brazil and the United States), Europe (Italy), Asia (the Philippines), and Africa (South Africa). The analysis will be grounded in historical methods and practices, while also drawing from environmental humanities and political ecology. It will incorporate oral history “to gain deeper insight into the life trajectories of key Church figures involved in environmental negotiations, as well as grassroots experiences that are often nearly invisible in written sources,” says Armiero. Additionally, the project will employ methodologies inspired by citizen science.

To carry out the project, Marco Armiero will be supported by a team comprising five PhD students, one postdoctoral researcher, and one research assistant. They will work alongside four principal investigators, each an expert in one of the selected case studies, as well as an ethical advisory board including two prominent theologians—one from Oxford and the other from Cape Town. Among the expected project outputs are an open-access oral history repository and a documentary film.

 

*Dr. Marco Armiero is an ICREA Senior Researcher at the Institute for the History of Science (IHC-UAB). He is a leading expert in environmental history and has worked on topics such as the history of environmentalism, environmental justice, and the politics of nature. “With this project, I’m entering a new field of research, though all my previous work has prepared me for this terrain, where a vast gap in the literature clearly exists,” the researcher notes. You can learn more about his research by visiting his UAB research profile or his ICREA profile.