Dr. Soogil Young has served as the Honorary Chairman of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Korea since 2020. Dr. Young founded SDSN Korea in 2013 and served as Director and then as Chairman, as well as a member of the UN SDSN Leadership Council which Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General, launched in 2012. During 2010-2012, he co-chaired Korea’s Presidential Committee on Green Growth with the Prime Minister under President Lee Myung-bak. Has also served as Chairman of the International Advisory Committee for the Green Growth Knowledge Platform, and Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Sweden-led Global Green Growth Forum.
During 2013-2019, he undertook research or taught on Korea’s development miracle and sustainable development at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management as a Visiting Professor, and during 2017-2019, on sustainable development at the State University of New York (SUNY) Korea as a Leading Professor. His research and publications covered Korea’s green growth policies, sustainable development challenges for Korea, as well as Korea’s decarbonization challenges, published 9 books (8 in Korean, 1 in English). In the earlier years, based at the Korea Development Institute (KDI) as a senior fellow since 1981, he contributed to Korea’s various economic reforms in the 1980s-1990s while serving on advisory committees for the government, including the 5-year program of trade liberalization in the 1980s and President Kim Young-sam’s epochal Emergency Decree on Real-Name Financial Transactions in 1993. He has served as President of the Korea Transport Institute, the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, and the National Strategy Institute. Also served as Korea’s Ambassador to the OECD (1998-2000). He has served on four Presidential Committees throughout his career. Born in Seoul, Dr. Young has a BSc in Chemical Engineering from Seoul National University (1967) and a Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland (1978).
