The Kyunghyang Forum

Speakers

The Kyunghyang Forum 2021

Forum
Program
Speakers

Speakers

Ban Ki-moon

The 8th UN Secretary General; President of the Assembly and Chair of the Council of Global Green Growth Institute(GGGI)
Al Gore

Former Vice President of the United States; Founder and Chairman, The Climate Reality Project
Jeremy Rifkin

Economic and social theorist; Author of The End of Work, The Global Green New Deal
Yannick Glemarec

Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund
Choe Jae-chun

Professor of Life Sciences at Ewha Womans University; Founder of The Biodiversity Foundation
David Wallace-Wells

Author of The Uninhabitable Earth; National Fellow at the New America Foundation
Hope Jahren

Author of The Story of More; J. Tuzo Wilson Professor at the University of Oslo
Michael E. Mann

Distinguished Professor at the Pennsylvania State University; Author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The New Climate War
Cho Hyo-je

Professor of Sociology at SungKongHoe University; Author of The End of Carbon Society
Angel Hsu

Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hong Jong-ho

Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University

Ban Ki-moon

The 8th UN Secretary General; President of the Assembly and Chair of the Council of Global Green Growth Institute(GGGI)

Ban Ki-moon served as the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 2007 to 2016. Before becoming Secretary-General, Mr. Ban was a career diplomat in South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Nations. Among his major initiatives was the 2007 Climate Change Summit, followed by extensive diplomatic efforts that have helped put the issue at the forefront of the global agenda. Mr. Ban also led the efforts for the Paris Climate Agreement, which entered into force in 2016 less than a year later. At the time of his election as Secretary-General, Mr. Ban was his country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His 37 years of service with the Ministry included postings in New Delhi, Washington D.C. and Vienna, and responsibility for a variety of portfolios, including Foreign Policy Adviser to the President, Chief National Security Adviser to the President, Deputy Minister for Policy Planning and Director-General of American Affairs.

Jeremy Rifkin

Economic and social theorist; Author of The End of Work, The Global Green New Deal

Jeremy Rifkin is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 21 bestselling books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment, including his most international bestseller, The End of Work (1995) as well as his most recent The Global Green New Deal (2019). He has been an advisor to the leadership of the European Union since 2000 as well as the leadership of the Peoples Republic of China regarding sustainable low-carbon economy. He has been a lecturer at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program, at the University of Pennsylvania, since 1994. He instructs CEOs and senior corporate management from around the world on global trends in science, technology, and commerce, and their impacts on the economy, society and the environment.

Al Gore

Former Vice President of the United States; Founder and Chairman, The Climate Reality Project

Former Vice President Al Gore is the cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis. He is also a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a member of Apple Inc.'s board of directors. Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years. In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for "informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change."

Yannick Glemarec

Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund

Yannick Glemarec is the Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund. He has 30 years of international experience in climate change, development and finance, and their interrelationships. He served as UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director for Policy and Programme in UN Women from 2015 to 2018, overseeing services provided by close to 2,000 UN Women staff in over 80 countries worldwide. Before joining UN Women, he was Executive Coordinator of the UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office in New York from 2013 to the beginning of 2015, where he was responsible for the design and administration of about 100 UN trust funds supporting humanitarian, post-conflict, development and climate action in over 100 countries. Yannick holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris in Environment Sciences, and two master’s degrees in Hydrology and Business Administration. He has authored several publications in the field of risk management, renewable energy, climate finance, and co-benefits between human rights, gender equality and climate action.

Choe Jae-chun

Professor of Life Sciences at Ewha Womans University; Founder of The Biodiversity Foundation

Choe Jae-chun is a Distinguished Chair Professor of EcoScience at Ewha Womans University. He is a Co-president of the Climate Change Center, Honorary Ambassador of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), and a Co-chairman of the National Assembly Forum on Climate Change. He has served as the President of the Ecological Society of Korea, Alternate President of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Founding Director of the National Institute of Ecology of Korea. Also, he established the Biodiversity Foundation with Professor Jane Goodall. He received his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology under the guidance of E. O. Wilson at Harvard University. His research focuses on sexual selection and social evolution of the Zoraptera, social conflict among colony-founding queens of Aztec ants, behavior and ecology of Black-billed Magpies, and mating system, vocal communication, and cognitive ecology of Javan Gibbons. An award-winning author, his books include (2012), (2008), and (1997).

David Wallace-Wells

Author of The Uninhabitable Earth; National Fellow at the New America Foundation

Wallace-Wells is a celebrated journalist who has spent his life living in cities, adding a much-needed focus on storytelling, as well as a look at geopolitical and economic consequences. The Uninhabitable Earth was named to the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2019, GQ's Best Books of 2019, the New Yorker's Favorite Books of 2019, and was chosen as one of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2019. And on top of that, Wallace-Wells will be serving as a consulting producer on the just-announced HBO Max anthology series of the same name, inspired by his book. Wallace-Wells is the Editor-at-large at New York magazine, where his viral cover story “The Uninhabitable Earth” was met with widespread acclaim, paving the way for his book. Formerly the Deputy Editor of The Paris Review, and a National Fellow at the New America Foundation, he is the co-host of the podcast 2038, which interrogates predictions about the next two decades.

Hope Jahren

Author of The Story of More; J. Tuzo Wilson Professor at the University of Oslo

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist and best-selling author. She shares her insights from her study of climate change and plants with humor and emotion, helping us see our interconnectedness and interdependence with the world around us. She is the best-selling author of The Story of More and Lab Girl. Jahren has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996, when she completed her Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley. She is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and is one of four scientists, and the only woman, to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given within the Earth Sciences. She was a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from 2008 to 2016, where she built the Isotope Geobiology Laboratories, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. She currently holds the J. Tuzo Wilson professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Michael E. Mann

Distinguished Professor at the Pennsylvania State University; Author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The New Climate War

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). Dr. Mann received his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Applied Math from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. degree in Physics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics from Yale University. His research involves the use of theoretical models and observational data to better understand Earth's climate system. He has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA's outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Cho Hyo-je

Professor of Sociology at SungKongHoe University; Author of The End of Carbon Society

Cho Hyo-je is professor of sociology at SungKongHoe University Seoul. He has written extensively on human rights, civil society, and recently on climate change. Among his published works are The End of Carbon Society (2020), The Frontier of Human Rights (2020), and The Horizons of Human Rights (2016). As the former president of the Korean Association of Human Rights Studies, he was closely involved in the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, and worked as adviser for Amnesty International. Professor Cho has held fellowship and visiting professorship at the universities of Harvard, Berlin and Costa Rica. He was the invited keynote speaker of the 2018 United Nations Conference on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dr. Cho studied sociology and social policy at Oxford University and the London School of Economics (LSE).

Angel Hsu

Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Angel Hsu is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and the Environment, Ecology and Energy Program (E3P) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also the Founder and Director of the Data-Driven EnviroLab, an interdisciplinary research group that innovates and applies quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues. Her research explores the intersection of science and policy and the use of data-driven approaches to understand environmental sustainability, particularly in the areas of climate change and energy, urbanization and air quality. Focusing particularly on China and the Global South, Dr. Hsu has provided expert testimony to the US-China Economic Security and Review Commission and is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations and a Public Intellectual Program Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Policy from Yale University.

Hong Jong-ho

Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University

Professor Hong Jong-ho is an economist and environmental specialist who is among the prominent Korean intellectuals who have called for responses toward the climate crisis. He received his B.A. at Seoul National University, M.A. at Michigan State University, then his Ph.D. At Cornell University, all in economics. Ever since, he has been researching environmental pollution and energy shortage issues that occur as result of humanity’s economic activities. He is concurrently the Co-representative of the nonprofit Energy Transition Korea. In past, he has served in academic positions at the Korea Development Institute and Hanyang University’s College of Economics & Finance, as Chairman at the Korea Association of Public Finance and Korea Environmental Economics Association, as consultant for the World Bank and Asia Development Bank, and was a member of the Presidential National Commission for Sustainable Development.