Shoutao Wu is a climate governance researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work bridges environmental governance, decolonial theories, and epistemological pluralism to critically examine carbon markets and carbon offsetting mechanisms as instruments of neocolonial power. Though grounded in climate justice, his research engages broader global governance questions, particularly how contemporary institutions reproduce imperial, extractive, and settler-colonial logics. Informed by Indigenous studies, ecofeminism, and Global South scholarship, he explores relational, embodied, and place-based climate knowledge systems as pathways toward pluriversal governance.