The Sustainability and Climate Changemaker

From a young age, Angie Xiong learned the importance of saving resources and environmental mindfulness, values instilled by her grandparents and parents. This foundational belief eventually led her to become a Project Director with WSP’s Sustainability, Energy and Climate Change team where her passion to tackle the challenges of climate change and shape a sustainable future is driving global impacts.

Angie works with corporate clients to understand and measure their environmental impact, develop ambitious and feasible targets, and set strategies to help decrease their ecological footprint. She’s guiding multinational corporations through their sustainability journey while also balancing equity and community needs.

Watch her full interview below.

I always just loved the earth. I was always the kind of kid that wanted to save water, turn off the lights when we’re not using them, recycle, reuse, and I think a lot of that came from my grandparents and my parents. My parents grew up in China during the cultural revolution and they really didn’t have very much in terms of material wealth. We never bought garbage bags, they would always reuse the plastic bags from grocery stores, and so, from a really young age I think it was really engrained in me that resources were precious. Personally, I wanted to live by those values, and I didn’t really have a term for that until I got to college and learned about sustainability.

What inspires and motivates the work that you do?

This challenge of climate change is one of the most, if not the most, pressing challenges that we face today. And all of this can feel really demoralizing sometimes. I'm just one person. What can I do? What’s really inspiring about this work is coming into the office and having this team of 150 people who are solely focused on this challenge. What’s been really exciting about this work is the kind of scale and impact that it can have. [Our team] works with a lot of corporations that have operations internationally and have a huge carbon, water and biodiversity footprint. Because they have such a big reach and big impact we can also have a really big positive impact if we just help them put together a plan and a strategy for sustainability.

How is WSP addressing equity within sustainability planning?

One way that equity gets integrated into our work here is we think a lot about how we can bring everyone along in the climate transition and not just those who already have the resources. So, one example of this is we're working with the City of Fort Lauderdale right now on their net zero plan. The foundation of the plan is that it needs to be a plan that's informed by community perspectives and prioritizes the needs of community along with achieving greenhouse gas reduction goals.