Climate as a Story or the Story
Moderator
Alex Wang is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, a Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and holds the Walter and Shirley Wang Chair in U.S.-China Relations and Communications. His research focuses on the law and politics of Chinese environmental governance. Previous work has examined Chinese climate policy, U.S.-China environmental cooperation and competition, environmental bureaucracy, information disclosure, public interest litigation, the role of state-owned enterprises in environmental governance, and symbolic uses of governance reform. Prior to joining UCLA Law, he was a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) based in Beijing and the creator and founding director of NRDC’s China Environmental Law & Governance Project. In that capacity, he worked with China’s government agencies, legal community, and environmental groups to improve environmental laws and strengthen the role of the public in environmental protection. He helped to establish NRDC’s Beijing office in 2006. He is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of the Environmental Law Institute, and a Co-Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the California-China Climate Institute.
Douglas Kysar is Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and faculty director of the Law, Environment and Animals Program. His teaching and research areas include torts, animal law, environmental law, climate change, products liability, and risk regulation. Kysar was previously on the faculty at Cornell Law School. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from Indiana University in 1995 and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1998. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable William G. Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Nina Lakhani joined The Guardian US in 2019 as the newspaper’s first climate justice reporter and is currently their senior climate justice reporter. Her reporting has covered access to land, water shortages, and Indigenous struggles in Mexico and Central America. Her book, Who Killed Berta Caceres?: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet, about the Lencan environmental activist in Honduras, was published by Verso Books in 2020.
Cascade Sorte is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Her lab’s research focuses on (1) the ecophysiological underpinnings of species’ distributions, (2) the impacts of climate-driven shifts in these distributions, (3) the interactions between climate change and species invasions, and (4) ways that species can “cope” with climate change (e.g. via acclimation, adaptation, and re-distribution). Sorte is a recent co-recipient of the Ecological Society of America’s 2021 George Mercer Award, which is given annually for an outstanding ecological research paper published by researchers early in their career. The award recognized a groundbreaking collaborative research article she published in 2019 on the impacts of invasive species.
