Yale at Climate Week NYC: Four-day summit kicks off Tuesday
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Yale University this week will convene thought leaders and organizations from across the Yale campus and around the world for a four-day summit in New York to explore and advance solutions to the global climate threat.
The event, which will be held from Sept. 24 to 27 at the Yale Club of New York City, coincides with Climate Week NYC, the largest annual climate event of its kind, and a meeting of the UN General Assembly.
Hosted by Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS) — the university-wide initiative created to amplify and drive solutions to the greatest environmental threats facing the planet — the event will highlight the breadth and depth of the university community’s work to address the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The opening day of the summit on Tuesday, Sept. 24 will be livestreamed and will include opening comments by Yale President Maurie McInnis and Yale Provost Scott Strobel, and a “fireside discussion” on climate leadership with former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry ’66, who was also the inaugural U.S. special envoy for climate.
Throughout the week, experts from diverse disciplines — from within Yale and beyond — will address timely climate-related topics, including a conversation with Tom Steyer ’79, the investor and business leader who over the past decade has become a global champion for climate action.
“Our Yale @ Climate Week events provide an exciting opportunity for us to engage in this critical conversation with partners from throughout the region and around the world,” said Julie Zimmerman, Yale’s inaugural vice provost for planetary solutions. “These events — inclusive of science and engineering, social science, humanities and the arts — exemplify our work to bring all that Yale is, and all that Yale does, to accelerating solutions to the grand planetary challenges of our time.”
Created in 2020, Yale Planetary Solutions fosters cross-disciplinary collaborations at Yale that fuse technical innovations, new data tools for modeling and monitoring, and the best scholarship from practically every field. YPS supports Yale-born innovation with seed grants, a program for small-scale “shovel-ready” projects, and the fostering of new interdisciplinary collaborations among faculty, students, and staff. Its ambitious efforts reflect the unique and critical role that universities can play in meeting the existential threat of climate change.
