December 12, 2007

OWU Alumnus Wins Nobel Prize for Work with IPCC

Woody Clark `67, co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Photo courtesy of clarkstrategicpartners.net.

Clark is one of 2,000 scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who are co-recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, along with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for his film An Inconvenient Truth. “I am still in shock,” says Clark of being a Nobel laureate.

Clark was a member of the scientific team for the IPCC Third Report, “Methodological and Technological Issues in Technology Transfer;” he co-wrote Chapter Two on “Trends in Technology Transfer: Financial Resource Flows” and co-edited Chapter Three on “International Agreements and Legal Structures.”

“After that I was asked to be the director of a report on ‘Technology Transfer of Environmentally Sound Technologies from Developed to Developing Nations’ for the newly formed UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (FCCC), which is now putting together the Kyoto Accords and their revisions,” Clark says.

His educational and professional background is varied. He has three master’s degrees in three different fields, as well as a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1980s, he had a mass media documentary company in San Francisco. “My films won awards and were well known,” says Clark. “But the income was not steady. Thus I went back to work within the academic world and taught entrepreneurship in the early 1990s, when the topic was not really known or taught. I got into the area of climate change due to my concern about research and development in the academic world becoming applicable to the business community.”

Clark began working in technology transfer at the California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) Business School. “My stronger interest came as Fulbright Fellow in 1994 at Aalborg University in Denmark, where I was visiting professor and learned a lot about wind turbines and bio-mass—both great renewable energy technologies.”

Today, Clark’s work continues to be diverse. He is the founder of Clark Strategic Partners, a full-service strategic planning company devoted to environmental and energy infrastructures. He is a qualitative economist who is an MBA lecturer at the Anderson Business School, University of California, Riverside and executive director of the Alternative Energy Center, UCR Palm Desert Heckmann Center for International Entrepreneurship. Clark recently completed a major study for the Asian Development on Inner Mongolia and is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, a publicly supported, independent economic think tank in Santa Monica.

Clark says he thinks the Al Gore film made people more aware of environmental issues. “Scientists knew about the problem of global warming but not how to alert and communicate [about] it. Gore and his media friends did that. There needs to be a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, and that is what I am thinking about next.”

For now, Clark hopes that all of us will make Earth-friendly changes in our personal and professional lives. “We need to be concerned about our families and our children, and do something today about it,” he says. “Not tomorrow or in 20 years. Now.”

– Ericka Kurtz