Participants:

Xiliang Zhang
Director of Institute of Energy, Environment, and Economy at Tsinghua University

Dr. Zhang Xiliang is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and Director of the Institute of Energy, Environment, and Economy at Tsinghua University. His current research interests include low-carbon energy economy transformation, integrated assessment of energy and climate policies, renewable energy and automotive energy. Since 2015, Professor Zhang has been heading the expert group on China’s national carbon market design, which is a taskforce of the Climate Change Department in the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. He also served as the co-leader of the expert group for drafting China’s Renewable Energy Law from 2004 to 2005, which was organized by the Environmental Protection and Resource Conservation Committee of the National People’s Congress, and as a lead author of the 4th and 5th IPCC Climate Change Assessment Report. Dr. Zhang is the current Chair of the Energy Systems Engineering Committee of the China Energy Research Society and a member of the board of directors of Chinese Society of Sustainable Development. He holds a PhD in Systems Engineering from Tsinghua University.

Andrew Yao
Dean of IIIS, Tsinghua University & Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute

Professor Yao is a world-renowned computer scientist and pioneer in cryptography and quantum computing. He was recipient of the Turing Award in 2000 and to date the only Chinese scientist receiving this highest honor in computer science. Professor Yao served on the faculty of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Princeton University before leaving Princeton in 2004 to join Tsinghua University. At Tsinghua, Professor Yao founded an elite undergraduate CS program (the “Yao Class”) in 2005, and another elite AI program (the “Zhi Class”) in 2019. He founded IIIS (Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences) in 2011 and built it into a world-renowned interdisciplinary research center, including a cutting-edge quantum computing laboratory. In 2018, Professor Yao established the Turing AI Institute (Nanjing) and the Core Technology Institute (Xian) to enable close innovation partnerships with municipalities. In 2020, he established the Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute to undertake AI-inspired fundamental research across disciplines. Professor Yao is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and foreign member of the US Academy of Sciences.

Susan David Carevic
Business Management Officer, ITS Technology and Innovation Team, the World Bank

Susan David Carevic provides technical expertise on the World Bank's Climate Warehouse project and is exploring how the use of technology can support other carbon market related activities. Ms. Carevic is one of the co-creators of the World Bank Group Blockchain Lab and within the Technology and Innovation Lab (TI Lab) led and contributed to use cases and research focused on digital identity, climate, land use, and energy. Before joining the Technology and Innovation Lab, she created strategic roadmaps to guide technology planning and investments, including the 2015 3-year strategy for the World Bank Group’s internal IT systems, and roadmaps supporting datacenter consolidation, integration, collaboration, and identity access management. Prior to coming to the World Bank Group, she served as the Product and Business Strategist, and Refugee Operations Manager for the U.S. State Department’s Refugee Processing Center in support of their worldwide refugee resettlement program. Ms. Carevic has a M.S. in Management Information Systems from George Washington University and a BA in Political Science and German from Purdue University.

Andreas Löschel
Professor, Centre of Applied Economic Research Münster (CAWM), University of Münster

Professor Andreas Löschel holds a Chair for Energy and Resource Economics and is director of the Center of Applied Economic Research at the University of Münster. He received his PhD in Economics at the University of Mannheim in 2003. Since 2011 he has been the chairman of the Expert Commission of the German Government to monitor the energy transformation. He also directs the Virtual Institute Smart Energy North Rhine-Westphalia (VISE). Andreas Löschel is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Report (2010-14, 2017-21). He is a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and a Visiting Chair Professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) economist ranking he was several times among the 50 most influential economists in Germany.

Xuedu Lu
Lead Climate Change Specialist, East Asia Department, Asian Development Bank (ADB)

Dr. Xuedu Lu has been working on low carbon development, low carbon technology, carbon trade, climate finance and other climate change business for 30 years. Prior to joining ADB, Dr. Lu used to take the positions: Deputy Director General of National Climate Center, Co-Director of Joint Lab of Climate Economic under China Meteorological Administration and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Member of the Executive Board of Clean Development Mechanism under Kyoto Protocol, Deputy Head of Global Environment Office, Ministry of Science and Technology, Director, Department of Social Development under Ministry of Science and Technology, Member of China Economy Council, and Adjunct Professor of Tianjin University and Tongji University.

As a member of Chinese delegation, he was engaged in the negotiations on UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol from 1996 to 2010.

Karsten Neuhoff
Professor, Climate Policy Department, DIW Berlin

Karsten Neuhoff leads the Climate Policy Department at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and is Professor at Technical University Berlin. He holds a Master in Physics from Heidelberg University and a PhD in Economics from Cambridge University. His research interests focus on the economics and financing of a low-carbon transformation in the power, industry and building sector. He investigates how policies and markets can be designed to achieve carbon neutrality. In research and advice projects for national governments, EU Commission and international organizations and as board member of the research network Climate Strategies he brings together multi-disciplinary teams and engages stakeholders to enhance quality, relevance, and uptake of the research. He published 60 journal articles and (co-)authored the books “Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the three domains of sustainable development” and “Climate Policy after Copenhagen - The Role of Carbon Pricing.”

Dirk Forrister
President and CEO, IETA

Dirk Forrister is President and CEO of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), a non-profit business association dedicated to market-based climate policies. With 140 member companies, IETA is respected globally as a thought leader on strategies to harness the power of markets to bring climate protection.

Dirk brings a long history of public and private sector engagement in energy and environmental policy. He spent a decade as Managing Director at Natsource LLC, the manager of carbon funds valued at $1.2 billion. Earlier in his career, Mr. Forrister served as Chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force in the Clinton Administration, and Assistant U.S. Secretary of Energy for Congressional and Public Affairs.

Suzi Kerr
Chief Economist, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)

Suzi Kerr is the Chief Economist at Environmental Defense Fund. She was, until May 2019, a Senior Fellow, and from 1998 - 2009 Founding Director, at Motu Research in New Zealand. She graduated from Harvard University in 1995 with a PhD in Economics. She has also worked at the University of Maryland at College Park, Resources for the Future (USA), and the Joint Center for the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. She was a Visiting Professor at Stanford University for the 2009/10 year, and at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in the first half of 2014. In 2018, she was President of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. Her research work focuses on domestic and international climate-change mitigation policy with special emphasis on emissions pricing and land use. She is the leader of the international ‘Climate Teams’ initiative. She is a member of the Advisory Boards for the Climate Econometrics group at Oxford and the International Emissions Trading Association ‘Markets for Natural Climate Solutions’ initiative.

Michael Mehling
Deputy Director, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), MIT

Michael Mehling is Deputy Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and a Professor at the School of Law of the University of Strathclyde. He has coordinated research and advisory projects on climate policy design and implementation for international organizations, government agencies, and civil society organizations in North America, Europe, and the developing world. His research focuses on climate policy design and implementation. He holds LLM and LLD degrees in international and environmental law from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a law degree from the University of Constance in Germany. Currently, Dr. Mehling serves on the Boards of the Blockchain Climate Institute (BCI) in London; Ecologic Institute in Washington DC and Berlin; and the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition (ERCST) in Brussels. Earlier, he served on the Board of Directors of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources US (IUCN-US), as a contributing author to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and as co-chair of the Scientific Committee of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC).

William Pizer
Professor, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University

Billy Pizer is the Susan B. King Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy and Faculty Fellow at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, both at Duke University. He came to Duke after serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the U.S. Treasury from 2008-2011. From 1996-2008, Pizer was Fellow and then Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, a think tank in Washington, DC. He was also a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2001-2002. He holds a BS in Physics from UNC Chapel Hill and a PhD and MA in Economics from Harvard University.

Pizer’s research has focused on the design of market-based environmental policies to address climate change. He has also examined the role of discounting and valuing future climate change consequences as well as the design of international climate change agreements. He has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles.

Michael R. Davidson
Assistant Professor, School of Global Policy & Strategy, UCSD

Michael R. Davidson is an assistant professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego. His research and teaching center on the engineering implications and institutional conflicts inherent in deploying low-carbon energy at scale, with a particular focus on China, India, and the U.S. He holds a Ph.D. in engineering systems from MIT and was previously a research fellow and associate at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Joanna Lewis
Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Joanna Lewis is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is also a faculty affiliate in the China Energy Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research examines political and technical determinants of energy and climate policy, as well as technology transfer and innovation in the energy sector. Much of her work focuses on China, where she has worked on energy and climate issues for two decades.

Sergey Paltsev
Deputy Director, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, MIT

Dr. Sergey Paltsev is a Director of the MIT Energy-at-Scale Center, a Senior Research Scientist at MIT Energy Initiative, and a Deputy Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. He is the lead modeler in charge of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model of the world economy. Dr. Paltsev is an author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and books in the area of energy economics, climate policy, taxation, advanced energy technologies, and international trade. Sergey was a Lead Author of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is a recipient of the 2012 Pyke Johnson Award (by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, USA, for the best paper in the area of planning and environment).

Christian Stoll
Strategy Consultant, Bain & Company

Dr. Christian Stoll is a strategy consultant at Bain & Company. He supported transformation projects and post-merger integrations in Europe and the Middle East in the past. He obtained his Ph.D. at Technical University of Munich, and has a research affiliation with the Center of Energy and Environmental Policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT CEEPR) since 2015. His research focuses on a broad variety of topics in the field of climate economics. The coverage of his publication “The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin” received more than 3 billion views on global media (e.g., on CNN, The New York Times, etc).