'All of these issues are interconnected'
Tyrone Jue, director of the San Francisco Environment Department, leads the city’s climate efforts. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Air District, where he has helped advance nation-leading regional clean air and pollution-reduction policies.
Tyrone Jue didn’t need much convincing to join the “Preferred Futures: Climate and Environmental Justice Across Borders” conference March 23-24.
When Stanford PhD student and conference co-chair Rwaida Gharib reached out to invite Jue onto a panel, his answer was immediate. “I’m 100% in,” he said, “because the conversation and discussion are exactly what we need right now.”
As director of the San Francisco Environment Department, Jue’s daily work involves environmental policy and community engagement. He joined the closing panel on climate mobility and displacement, which brought together practitioners, academics, and advocates to examine the challenges frontline communities are navigating.
“This conference is the kind of space where we get to share what we’re doing and also get to receive the gift of learning from others,” Jue said.
For Jue, the conference reinforced a core conviction: These problems can’t be solved in silos. “All of these issues are interconnected and no matter what part of the space you’re operating in, whether it’s internationally, whether it’s locally here, it’s all part of one and the same,” he said. “We have to look at the whole systemic issue in order to make the progress that we all want.”
He sees an opportunity for the Doerr School of Sustainability’s Center for Just Environmental Futures to bridge research and community.
“The trust doesn’t come from the institutions that are empowered. It comes from: Here’s the data and here’s the information, go forth and make change. And that cannot be replicated anywhere else,” Jue said. “This school has a perfect opportunity to be able to scale that sort of model, to basically give the community what they need in terms of capacity information and then allow the community to effectuate change within their area.”
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