Lewis & Clark’s 27th Annual Environment Across Boundaries (ENVX) Symposium began on Sept. 30. The symposium, whose theme was “Green Innovation in China and the US: Creating Climate Solutions,” featured a variety of events centered around the topic of China’s role in and response to contemporary climate issues. These events included a film screening, panel discussion and two keynote presentations by experts on the subject.
The first of these keynote speakers, Dr. Angel Hsu, spoke on Oct. 1 to an audience in the Council Chambers.
Hsu is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Environment, Ecology and Energy Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the founder and director of the Data-Driven EnviroLab, an interdisciplinary and international organization of researchers, scientists, programmers and visual designers based at UNC which uses data analysis to develop policy solutions to modern environmental concerns.
She holds a Doctorate in Environmental Policy from Yale University, a Master’s in Environmental Policy from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor’s in Biology and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Wake Forest University.
Beyond academia, Hsu has shown significant dedication to public outreach. She was a speaker at TED’s 2018 Age of Amazement and the 2020 Climate Countdown event. She was also recognized as a 2022 Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst, an honor for leaders shaping the global economy, and an inaugural Grist 50 leader, a list of innovators in climate and justice. She regularly contributes to the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils, where she co-chairs the council on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Global Public Goods and serves on the Clean Air council, both of which focus on advancing sustainable global policies.
Associate Professor and Director of Environmental Studies Jessica Kleiss, who also serves as the symposium’s faculty advisor, welcomed the audience to the first event of this year’s ENVX Symposium.
“Thank you all so much for coming to our keynote event of the 27th Annual Environment Across Boundaries Symposium. We are so happy to have you here today,” she said.
Kleiss then spoke on the symposium’s theme.
“I am just excited to explore the range of pollution and climate problems that plague us, across the U.S., across China, across a variety of regions, all regions of the world, and the innovative and exploratory approaches that are being taken that we can learn from our own country, from other countries, and expand and explore new solutions and opportunities,” she said.
Kleiss welcomed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Japanese Bruce Suttmeier to the podium.
Suttmeier praised Kleiss for serving as the faculty advisor to the symposium. He also praised the symposium’s co-chairs, Kaia Hirsch ’26 and Morgaine McGrath ’25.
“Thank you all for coming, and thanks especially to Jessica Kleiss, who does so much work in putting this event together, along with the co-chairs, Morgaine and Kaia. I saw one percent of what they did, and still, I was tired, just seeing all the work they did putting this together,” he said. “Environmental Studies, probably more than any department on campus, does incredible interdisciplinary work, looking across differences, across different disciplines, to ask really interesting questions.”
Suttmeier also thanked Laura Mundt, the administrative specialist for the Environmental Studies department, for her efforts in organizing the symposium. As he left the stage, McGrath stepped up to the podium to continue the event.
“Kaia and I have put a lot of time into this, so it’s really great to see everyone here,” she said.
McGrath introduced Hsu, recounting some of her background.
“Dr. Hsu’s research dives into environmental sustainability issues such as energy, urbanization, air quality and how public policy interacts with those topics,” she said. “I know you will all see soon the reason why I’m so happy to introduce to you our night’s keynote speaker, Angel Hsu.”
After McGrath’s introduction, the audience applauded as Hsu made her way to the podium.
“Thank you all for being here — I know it was stiff competition with the vice presidential debate with JD Vance and Governor Walz so I’m hoping that I will be able to put on a good show,” Hsu said. “I’m particularly excited because these types of boundary-crossing, transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary conversations are exactly what we need in order to solve the climate crisis.”
However, her appreciation for interdisciplinary thinking was thoroughly established by the work she did immediately after graduating college.
“But it wasn’t until my first job at the World Resources Institute, which is an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., that I really began to understand what interdisciplinarity really meant and its importance for solving really challenging environmental issues like climate change,” she said. “So I realized that in order to have effective climate solutions, they had to be grounded in data and robust science.”
Hsu said that it was through this professional work that she began to engage with Chinese environmental issues.
“While working on a project called the greenhouse gas protocol, which established the global standard for corporations and governments to measure and account for their greenhouse gas emissions, I was sent to China as one of the very first employees to open up the Beijing office,” she said. “That was an incredible time to be in China, because right before my very eyes … I was going to see this incredible transformation of a country that was really grappling with incredible economic growth on one hand, but then these incredibly pressing environmental challenges, growing air pollution and water scarcity, growing greenhouse gas emissions, energy crises.”
Hsu then transitioned into discussing the main subject of her presentation, US-China climate cooperation.
“So when I met with the committee to talk about what I would do for the next 45 minutes, there were a lot of ideas that were thrown about cities and climate change, and we talked about U.S. and China collaboration on a sub-national scale. I think (the) Belt and Road Initiative was also thrown in there, and love or hate it, AI was also introduced as a potential topic for me to cover. So not being somebody who shies away from a challenge, I decided to try to do all of that in this talk today,” she said.
Then, she began to discuss the first section of her lecture.
“I want to highlight the dual role that cities play in terms of being some of the most effective places on the planet when it comes to the climate crisis, but then also, they are drivers of climate change and hold some of the solutions,” she said.
Hsu explained that in the Anthropocene, an unofficial unit of geologic time describing the period during which humanity began to substantially alter Earth’s surface and systems, humans have been able to achieve enormous population growth. This is seen in the explosion of GDP, foreign direct investment and urban population, which are all indicators of technological progress and global connectivity. However, she continued, these achievements have come at the cost of worrying environmental trends, including increases in greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion and land degradation.
“We can see that even though, in this great acceleration, we have achieved remarkable, unprecedented human development and progress, it has come at the cost of exacerbating these environmental impacts, and so our planet is now straining under the weight of humanity,” Hsu said.
She said that urban population centers have complex climate cycles; they generate greenhouse gas emissions through human activities, but can also moderate this effect through soil and vegetative emission absorption.
Hsu said that the urban heat island effect, where urban areas tend to experience significantly higher temperatures than outlying rural areas, contributes massively to the overall global warming of the planet.
“We’re expecting to add another two and a half billion people to urban areas by 2050 and most of that growth is happening in Asia and also in Africa, and those are already some of the areas in the world that are experiencing some of the greatest increases in temperature,” Hsu said. “Climate impacts are felt disproportionately in urban communities with the most economically and socially marginalized being the most affected, and that’s really due to, as we saw in those previous trends, the growth of urban population predominantly in the Global South.”
Hsu cited Hurricane Helene as an example of the extreme weather events driven by climate change, highlighting its impact on the southeastern U.S. where she was born and raised.
She proceeded to explain that much of her work examines cities not just as engines of economic growth but also as sites of inequality.
Hsu showed satellite images of Los Angeles on the screen. She explained that LA neighborhoods with a high average income had much more tree cover and shade than those with a low average income. This results in low-income neighborhoods being exposed to higher temperatures than high-income neighborhoods, even within the same city. This trend extends to urban areas worldwide, except in China.
“The urbanization dynamics are quite different in China, where you actually have much wealthier people living within cities, and you still have predominantly agrarian and rural communities that have access to greater shade and tree power,” Hsu said.
Hsu continued her presentation, explaining that cities generally have to both mitigate their emissions and adapt to the realities of a climate that is already warming. She said that her research primarily focuses on the mitigation aspect of city climate strategies.
“Most of my research is focused … on the role of cities as mitigators of climate change, and how can they reduce their own carbon footprint to try to reduce emissions,” she said. “And if we take a look at the IPCC and the goals that scientists have specified are needed in order for us to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, they certainly thought that we need to contain global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”
Hsu said that national governments are not attenuating emissions at a rate that would satisfy the IPCC’s 1.5-degree maximum increase by 2100. So, she and some colleagues wrote a paper discussing the concept of net zero cities, which pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
“Can cities also decarbonize and fully go down to net zero? And what does that really take?” she said.
Hsu noted that the widespread commitment of cities and sub-national governments to climate action is encouraging, as it enables progress against climate change despite obstacles at the national or geopolitical level. She pointed to the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord as examples of how broader political forces can hinder climate efforts.
Hsu said that the ever-evolving relationship between the U.S. and China has made progress occasionally inconsistent, since there are times when the two powers have not been amiable enough to collaborate and discuss climate change. However, collaboration at the sub-national level has been able to sustain the momentum of climate action collaboration. For example, she said, former California Governor Jerry Brown went to China and met with President Xi Jinping.
“This is highly unusual. Governors normally don’t meet with heads of states one to one, and that’s exactly what he did. And he convened this global climate action summit in San Francisco in 2018; they brought a huge Chinese delegation. I was there — it was incredible. They signed more than 20 memorandums of understanding covering zero emissions, vehicles, emissions, training, air pollution (and) clean energy,” Hsu said.
Hsu explained that after former President Donald Trump was elected, many U.S. officials began looking to China as the potential new leader in climate action. This shift occurred because Trump’s platform restricted government efforts to address climate change by scaling back regulations and boosting the fossil fuel industry.
“I think the tables are really turning; I think we have a lot to learn from our Chinese counterparts,” she said.
Hsu’s research supports the idea that China’s local climate commitments hold significant promise. If all provinces and cities fully implemented their net zero pledges, their combined impact would surpass the national government’s climate goals.
In contrast, the U.S. falters. Only 19 states have committed to achieving net zero emissions, which falls short of what the U.S. has promised to achieve at the national level.
Hsu pivoted to discussing the realities of climate policy on the city level. She explained that, although there is some data about the efficacy of different climate policies, there are many different contexts and circumstances across regions that are difficult to account for within the data available. There is a lack of consistent and comparable emissions data, inconsistent accounting and limited evaluations of the effectiveness of policies. Some cities do not report data at all, which makes it difficult to track international progress toward achieving environmental goals.
“There’s a large uncertainty about future urbanization trajectories, so huge amounts of data gaps and active information, and still a lot of chasms in terms of our understanding of this relationship between the cities and what they can actually do to address the climate crisis,” she said. “In fact, the IPCC now has a special report for cities and climate change, and it’s the only special report in this upcoming cycle. So anyone who’s working on climate-related research, definitely try to publish it, because we need information to help fill some of these gaps.”
Hsu explained that this is where AI can help in fighting the ongoing climate crisis.
“And so AI is now being bandied for being able to do so many different things with respect to climate change and environment, energy grid optimization,” she said.
AI can allow people to efficiently manage power grids and building energy expenditure. It also has useful applications in precision agriculture and traffic control.
Hsu’s team analyzed more than 40 Chinese provincial five-year plans, finding that many provinces are now mentioning the use of smart technology to the socio-economic issues posed by climate issues.
Hsu highlighted the Chinese City Brain Initiative, a project by Alibaba that uses AI to analyze data from sources like transportation, tourism and municipal administration. This data is then used to manage city systems, including traffic lights and emergency services.
She also discussed the Black and Smelly Waters app, piloted by the Chinese government, which enables citizens to report polluted bodies of water. The government can then respond to the report and clean the reported pollution site.
Hsu acknowledged that an increasingly popular approach to creating climate solutions is also the most controversial: generative AI. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have become useful to both researchers and policymakers working to collect data and craft policy dealing with climate issues.
“Now there are climate change-specific large language models that are emerging to help guide policy, to make it easier to try to sift through 1000s of pages of documents,” she said. “This type of technology really provides a lot of potential to do that at scale and much faster.”
Hsu’s research group, Data-Driven EnviroLab, even created their own LLM to specifically deal with the hallucination issue observed in many generic LLMs, in which AI generates misleading or inaccurate results based on flawed or nonexistent data.
Hsu acknowledged the energy cost of maintaining AI engines and the issues raised by AI “redlining” in which unregulated AI may perpetuate racial and systemic biases. She says that’s why collaboration between the U.S. and China is so important: these are both nations which have demonstrated interest in becoming AI powerhouses, so they must collaborate to overcome the issues raised by AI’s limitations.
Hsu concluded by saying that there are significant opportunities for collaboration between the U.S. and China in leveraging technology and data to support effective city-level climate action, but this also comes with important challenges and risks that require careful consideration. She calls for continued research, innovation and U.S.-China cooperation while emphasizing the need to address issues like increased energy demand, algorithmic biases and the importance of transparency and trust in using these technologies to guide global climate policy and implementation.
Friday, Oct. 4 marks the final day of the ENVX Symposium. The final event is RSVP only and encourages participants to discuss climate solutions as a group with the potential to win prizes.
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