David Scott Mathieson is the senior researcher on Myanmar/Burma in the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch.

Neil Ormerod is a professor of theology at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is director of its Centre for Catholic Thought and Practice. Anticipating Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical, he called it “a landmark in Catholic social teaching.”

Cardinal Peter Turkson is a Catholic cardinal from Ghana and president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He worked with Pope Francis on the writing of the encyclical and delivered several speeches in advance of its publication that are believed to give a glimpse into its contents.

Bill Patenaude is a special lecturer of theology at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is the chief author of Catholic Ecology, where he has speculated about what Pope Francis’ encyclical might contain. Contact via Chrissy Centazzo.

Michael Peppard is an assistant professor at Fordham University in New York City.

Austen Ivereigh is a U.K.-based writer, journalist and commentator best known for his books on and with Pope Francis, and for his role in the media explaining the convictions of the Catholic Church. He is Fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, Oxford, and a regular contributor to The Tablet, America magazine and Commonweal, […]

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a distinguished professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and an “ordinary academician” at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome. His work is expected to have contributed to Pope Francis’ encyclical.

Riccardo Cascioli is the author of Lies of the Environmentalists and has criticized Pope Francis’ involvement in climate change, which Cascioli sees as a wedge into changing Catholic doctrine about the sanctity of life. He is also the editor of La nuova Bussola Quotidiana, an Italian Catholic news and opinion site.

Marc Morano is executive director of ClimateDepot.com and communications director at Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a conservative think tank in Washington that is skeptical of man-made climate change. He has been critical of Pope Francis’ involvement in climate change issues and his reliance on United Nations climate change data.