European Practitioner Achievement Award in Applying Environmental Economics 2009: Bert Metz

Dr. Bert Metz is the winner of the EAERE European Practitioner Achievement Award in Applying Environmental Economics. EAERE has conferred this Award to Dr. Metz as a way of public recognition of his long list of achievements in putting the ideas of environmental economics into practise. His contribution has been particularly noteworthy in leading the work of the IPCC, which was established to provide the decision-makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information about climate change. Through his work, Bert Metz has introduced environmental economics’ ideas on sustainable development and climate change to the highest level of policymaking and to a wide audience across the world, demonstrating the suitability of the economic analysis tools in these areas of environmental policy.

Bert Metz was born in 15 August 1945. He obtained an Engineer’s degree in Chemical Engineering at Delft University of Technology and subsequently his Ph.D. degree at the same university. From 1976 to 1987 he worked for Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment in the fields of air pollution, external safety, noise pollution, chemical waste and the enforcement of environmental laws, interrupted by a 2 year period, when he was Senior Lecturer and Acting Head of Department of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria.
From 1987 until 1992 he was Counsellor for Health and Environment at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Washington DC. In 1992 he became Deputy Director for Air and Energy of the Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment, with responsibility for climate policy.
Bert Metz led the Netherlands delegation to the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Convention. In 1997 he moved to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency to head the group on climate change and global sustainability and was elected as co-chairman of the Working Group on Climate Change Mitigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN for the preparation of the Third Assessment Report. In 2002 he was re-elected in that position for the 4th Assessment Report cycle. Currently, Metz is a fellow with the European Climate Foundation and a leading member of the ClimateWorks Foundation Catalyst project team, providing analysis and a discussion platform for the ongoing international climate change negotiations.