As global climate leaders converge in New York, Yale to host major summit

Yale University will host a four-day summit in New York City next month to highlight the breadth and depth of the university community’s work to address the intersecting and compounding challenges of global climate change and biodiversity loss. The program will coincide with Climate Week NYC, the largest yearly climate event of its kind, and the annual gathering of the UN General Assembly.

Under the banner of Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS) — the university-wide initiative created to amplify and drive solutions to the greatest environmental threats facing the planet — leading thinkers and organizations from across campus and around the world will convene at the Yale Club of New York City from Sept. 24 to 27. With a mission to bring “all that Yale is, and all that Yale does” to accelerate planetary solutions, university leaders say, this summit provides an ideal opportunity to challenge the status quo and aim to advance planetary solutions through inquiry and innovation, policy and action, and community engagement and empowerment.

Yale President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel will open the multi-day program. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry ’66, who was also the inaugural U.S. special envoy for climate, is also among opening-day participants. The Sept. 24 events will be broadcast via livestream, and registration is now open at this link.

“At Yale, we understand that the issues at stake — from sea level rise and the loss of biodiversity to food insecurity and the availability of clean water — require focused and committed attention,” McInnis said. “As a research university that not only generates knowledge but is able to translate discovery into action, Yale is well positioned to provide the kind of leadership needed to advance a more sustainable, healthy future.”

Yale @ Climate Week’s four-day program, she said “offers a critical platform for Yale, working with partners from across the globe, to identify and advance transformative planetary solutions.”

The global stage offered by Climate Week NYC — a citywide summit that attracts business leaders, political change-makers, scientists, and representatives of civil society from across the world — presents an opportunity to strengthen existing collaborations and foster new partnerships between the university and national and international governments, industry, and non-governmental organizations, Yale leaders say. Climate Week NYC is coordinated by the Climate Group, an international nonprofit, in partnership with the UN General Assembly.

Created in 2020, Yale Planetary Solutions is a university-wide initiative that unites leaders and experts across Yale’s campus, and across fields of expertise. It grew out of recommendations from a 2018 report of the University Science Strategy Committee, which identified environmental and evolutionary sciences as among the priority areas where Yale can have global impact.

“YPS is intended to be the ‘north star’ for Yale’s efforts to address the most complex challenges facing the planet at this critical time,” said Julie Zimmerman, Yale’s inaugural vice provost for planetary solutions. “By tapping into Yale’s collective power, we can fast-track solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. Yale’s vast resources offer countless ways to make a difference, but real progress demands that every corner of the university comes together in delivering the urgent action needed in our world.”

To date, YPS has awarded more than $5.5 million in seed grants to dozens of innovative projects from across the Yale community involving faculty and staff alike. Projects have included new systems for converting carbon dioxide into fuels, chemicals, and materials; one that uses artificial intelligence technologies to combat biodiversity loss; and another that works with local communities to identify projects to mitigate the climate impacts for the most vulnerable populations. YPS has also created a separate program that supports small-scale, “shovel-ready” projects that can advance solutions such as monitoring air quality in New Haven and implementing a curriculum focused on the city’s environmental history. And it has convened a series of “CoLABoratories” across campus where faculty, staff, and students could brainstorm new projects and explore potential interdisciplinary collaborations.

Though deeply rooted in New Haven, YPS explicitly aims to engage with leaders and experts beyond Yale to translate knowledge into action and impact.  Beginning with last year’s UN climate conference in Dubai (COP28), YPS has coordinated the efforts of Yale-affiliated participants at major climate-focused events. The Yale @ Climate Week NYC gathering represents an opportunity to convene leaders from Yale and beyond to explore a range of climate-related topics — and to illustrate the important role that Yale can play as a convener and as a driver of innovative solutions, said Zimmerman.

“We are bringing to bear the full weight of the university’s resources and expertise to meet this moment,” she said. “Yale Planetary Solutions will be a bridge not only between the different communities on campus, but between our academics and our operations. Between our university and our home city of New Haven. Between Yale and the world. Between today and a better tomorrow.”

Events during the week include a panel discussion with Kerry; a fireside chat with Tom Steyer ’79, the investor and business leader who over the past decade has become a global champion for climate action; and an on-stage interview with Bill McKibben, author and founder of the environmental organization 350.org.

Throughout the week, experts from diverse disciplines — from within Yale and beyond — will address timely climate-related topics, including the role of the academic community in tackling climate change; strategies for achieving climate justice; the public health costs of climate change; how to better align the global trade system with sustainability goals; how to hold meat and dairy companies accountable for climate harms; the state of carbon markets; the role of architecture in creating a more sustainable society; the geopolitical implications of climate policy; the transformative benefits of green chemistry and green engineering; paths to a more sustainable health system; and how thought leaders and organizations can translate innovative solutions at scale.

View the full schedule here.

The week’s events will demonstrate the kinds of cross-disciplinary collaborations happening at Yale that fuse technical innovations, new data tools for modeling and monitoring, and the best scholarship from practically every field.

Yale’s climate commitment

Yale Planetary Solutions is the latest manifestation of Yale’s longstanding commitment to environmental stewardship and of its intensive, campus-wide focus on the climate crisis — one that builds on the university’s history of enabling and supporting interdisciplinary research about the environment, climate, and sustainability.

In 1990, the university created the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies to support and inspire the broader environmental community at Yale. This served as a model for interdisciplinary collaboration on campus, and the university has since established a wide variety of environmental centers and programs that serve as nodes of research and teaching activity.

Based on their success, interdisciplinary efforts on campus have expanded in scale and scope to address planetary challenges. In 2021, the university launched the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, to develop nature-based solutions to climate change; and a year ago, it introduced the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions to enable transformative geospatial research that solves humanity’s challenges.

For more than two decades, Yale has also been a leader in articulating and advancing its own operational sustainability goals. In 2004, Yale became the first university to establish a greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal; with input from the community, it has developed a series of increasingly ambitious strategies for achieving it, including more efficient space-use policies that yield emissions reductions and a “zero carbon ready” standard for building renovations and new construction. These strategies will contribute to Yale’s commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions on campus by 2035 and zero actual carbon emissions by 2050.

All of these ambitious efforts — and a growing number of Yale-born projects being supported by YPS — reflect the unique and critical role that universities can play in meeting the existential threat of climate change, said Strobel, Yale’s provost.

Yale’s commitment to research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice means it can and should lead in addressing the climate challenge, he said, guided by its mission to “improve the world today and for future generations.”

“Climate change and biodiversity loss are terribly complex issues that cannot be solved by a single field or one approach,” Strobel said. “The breadth and depth of Yale’s excellence in the sciences and engineering, combined with profound strength in the arts and humanities, allow Yale to devise solutions from multiple angles.

“We must use the full weight of our expertise and resources, in close and constant partnership with others, to help identify and advance solutions.”