Summit Dialogue, Ep. 7: Angel Hsu on the Global Climate Action Summit

This is an exceptional podcast in this ‘Summit Dialogue’ series. First, it is our pleasure to interview Yale’s Angel Hsu, the founder and director of Data-Driven Yale. We have corralled Angel to discuss the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) that was held in San Francisco from September 12-14, 2018. This summit is a notable event called by California’s Governor Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg. The attendees included many sub-state actors from provinces and states, municipalities and regions (some 6,000) and many, many non-state actors including foundations, activists and private corporations (some 2,000). These actors were intent in promoting efforts and commitments on carbon emission reductions at something other than at the national government level. We were also keen to question Angel on recently released report for the Summit titled, “Global Climate Action From Cities, Regions and Businesses”. This Report, led by Angel, was a three-year effort to aggregate the climate commitments by these many sub-states and non-state actors. It was also my pleasure to include in the questioning of Angel our first ‘Munk-V20-Brookings Fellow’, Claire Floody. Claire from Centennial College’s journalism program had joined us in Buenos Aires for the final T20 Argentina meeting. There we had, among other things, worked on this podcast. Angel is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at Yale-NUS College and is also an Adjunct Professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She has written extensively on the subject of carbon emissions reduction and on climate change policy.