Lailai Li

Director, WRI China

Bio

Dr. Lailai Li is the China Country Director for WRI China. Dr. Li serves as the lead representative for WRI China and is responsible for formulating, leading, and implementing WRI’s vision and strategy in China. She manages relationships and guides its work to advance China’s environmental and sustainability goals. Dr. Li works closely with the program leads in China and with WRI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to achieve our mission and ensure that our projects and approach are strategically aligned.

Prior joining WRI, Dr. Li was the Deputy Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and Director of SEI Asia Centre. She also served as a deputy director of China Urban Sustainable Transport Research Centre based in Beijing. Previously, she directed the LEAD-China program for 10 years, which is a worldwide network of new generation leadership in the environment and development arena.

Dr. Li is a globally recognized leader in sustainability and environmental issues with nearly 20 years of experience, including a focus on poverty alleviation and environment issues, climate change adaptation, low-carbon urban transport, and more. Her recent research work and research include: economics of climate change in China; China’s ecosystem services and management strategy; low-carbon development of small and medium sized cities in China; the regional climate change adaptation knowledge platform in Asia; and the Sustainable Mekong Research Network, among others.

Dr. Li is a widely recognized expert and published author. She received her Post-Doctoral Fellow at Peking University, in Beijing, and received her PhD and MA from the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States.

WRI has worked in China for many years, and established its first overseas office in Beijing in 2008. WRI China focuses on issues related to energy, climate change, water, transport, integrated urban development and sustainable cities. It currently has more than two dozen full-time staff in China and is looking to expand in the coming years.

Blog Posts

In China, Waste No Time in Stopping Waste
by Lailai Li - August 07, 2013
Being "thrifty" means spending one cent as if you have only half a cent. This is an old Chinese saying to warn people to handle affluence without forgetting about a potential crisis. Underlying this common sense is an ethic rooted in Chinese culture: wasting is bad.

President Xi Jinping has urged Chinese people to "build a thrifty society", because if we persist with our business-as-usual production and consumption pattern we would invite a resource and environmental crisis.

One "inconvenient truth" is that China uses about 20 percent of the total global energy to produce about 12 percent of the world GDP. The country's energy consumption per unit of GDP is 2.2 times that of the world average. A similar pattern is seen in the consumption of other resources such as steel, cement and other raw materials, as highlighted by State leaders and experts at the International Forum on Building Ecological Civilization hold in Guiyang, Guizhou province, last month. In doing so, the leaders indicated that huge amounts of energy could be saved in China by improving efficiency.

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