Tribute to Prof. Maria do Carmo Martins Sobral — World Environment Day

On this June 5th, World Environment Day, RBCIAMB pays tribute to Prof. Maria do Carmo Martins Sobral, our Editor Emerita and Editor-in-Chief in 2014–2015, whose life's work is, in itself, a declaration of love for the planet.

A Civil Engineer from UFPE, with a doctorate in Environmental Planning from the Technical University of Berlin and postdoctoral research in Germany and the Netherlands, Maria do Carmo has built a career that spans continents — from the University of Waterloo to IHE-UNESCO, from Oslo to UFPE, where she has been a full professor since 1983. More than 100 scientific articles, dozens of books and book chapters, and over 70 completed supervisions of master's, doctoral, and postdoctoral students — her girls and her boys, as she likes to call them. A body of work that is not merely vast — it is purposeful.

Today's date carries a precious coincidence: fifteen years have passed since the creation of the Environmental Sciences Area at CAPES, a structure that Maria do Carmo helped to conceive and was the first to coordinate following its establishment. Even before this consolidation, as early as 2012, she had already foreshadowed the reach of this field by co-leading the coordination of the book Contribution from brazilian postgraduate studies to sustainable development Capes at Rio+20 — a landmark publication prepared by the Environmental Sciences Area for the United Nations Conference Rio+20. Fifteen years on, the field she helped to found continues to produce knowledge with vigor — and that story bears, in part, her indelible mark.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Pernambuco Academy of Engineering, and the Pernambuco Academy of Sciences, recently inducted into the ANE board of directors, and honored by the Recife City Council for her advocacy in defense of the environment and for her commitment to building a more just world — Maria do Carmo has accumulated recognitions that merely affirm a life devoted to sustainability.

RBCIAMB is proud to count her among its history. And on this symbolic day, we celebrate a scientist who has never separated academic rigor from commitment to life — to water, to the climate, to the generations yet to come.

Congratulations, Prof. Maria do Carmo. The environmental cause has in you one of its most steadfast and luminous voices.