VIRIATO SOROMENHO-MARQUES

University of Lisbon

Viriato Soromenho-Marques teaches Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, and European Ideas in the Departments of Philosophy and European Studies of the University of Lisbon, where he is Full Professor.

Since 1978 he has been engaged in the civic environmental movement in Portugal and Europe. He was Chairman of Quercus (1992-1995). He is member of the National Council on Environment and Sustainable Development. He was Vice-Chair of the European Environmental and Sustainable Development Advisory Councils network (2001-2006). In 2004 he was invited to be one of the five authors of the Portuguese National Strategy for Sustainable Development. In 1997 he received from the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic the degree of «Grande Oficial da Ordem do Mérito Civil» and in 2006 the degree of «Grande Oficial da Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique». He was the scientific coordinator of the Gulbenkian Environment Program (2007-2011). This Program provided over 2 million euros of funding resources to numerous sustainable projects both in Portugal as well in countries like Armenia, Mozambique and India. He was one of the twelve members of the High Level Group on Energy and Climate Change by invitation of the President of the European Commission (2007-2010).

He is correspondent member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, Class of Humanities (Letras), since 2008, and from the Marine Academy since 2012. He was the representative of public opinion in the Press Council (1985-1987). He is or was a regular contributor to some Portuguese mass media like the Jornal de Letras, Diário de Notícias and RTP and also the Portuguese and Brazilian Sections of the BBC.

Among other Prizes and distinctions he was awarded with the Environment Quercus 2011 Prize, and considered in 2009 by the daily newspaper Correio da Manhã, as one of the 30 most outstanding personalities in the recent three decades. In 1993 and 2012 he was distinguished with regional awards from his hometown, Setúbal (respectively, by the city mayor and the regional newspaper O Setubalense). In 2014 he was also awarded by the Federação Portuguesa do Pulmão (medical association of respiratory illnesses) with thePrize Personality of the Year The German Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBS) considered his text (co-authored with Ricardo Cabral) “Portugal: 40 Years of Democracy and Integration in the European Union”, published within the realm of the HBS European Policy Programme, as the “Article of the Year 2014”.

He wrote over four hundred works on Philosophy, Environment and International Relations matters. He was speaker in over one thousand conferences in Portugal and twenty three other countries. Some of his texts and books are translated to Spanish, French, English, German, Norwegian and Mandarin.