EAERE ELECTIONS 2021
In 2021 EAERE members will vote for a President (who will join the Council as President-Elect in 2022-2023, serve as President in 2024-2025, and act as Past-President in 2026-2027), and two new members of the Council who will serve for four years beginning in 2022.
The nominations were handled by a Nominating Committee comprised of Matti Liski (chair), Lucas Bretschger, and Astrid Dannenberg. EAERE is grateful for the important service they rendered to the Association.
CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT
SIMONE BORGHESI
VALENTINA BOSETTI
CANDIDATES FOR COUNCIL MEMBERS
ENRICA DE CIAN
KLAUS EISENACK
MADS GREAKER
ÅSA LÖFGREN
Elections will be run electronically from June 1st to July 10th, 2021. In early June 2021 members will be sent detailed information about the voting mechanism.
The results of the elections will be announced in mid-July, 2021.
Your President and Council give shape, style and leadership to our organisation, and it is important that they have a real mandate from the membership, so please vote, and encourage your colleagues to do likewise.
Simone BORGHESI
EUI – Florence School of Regulation and University of Siena
Italy
“I would like to express my gratitude to the Nominating Committee for proposing my name for the EAERE Presidency and to the Council for supporting the proposal. It would be a great honor for me to serve a community which I have seen grow over time and in which I feel at home.
If elected, I would like to bring my experience accumulated in different contexts, in particular as Secretary General of the Policy Outreach Committee (POC) in the last three years, as Director of FSR Climate at the European University Institute since 2017, and as council member and past President of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (IAERE). Each of these experiences has given me the opportunity to learn and build something new. The role as Secretary General of POC has provided me a unique chance to work at the interface between policy and science, joining forces and efforts with the other POC members for a fascinating challenge of utmost importance. The role of Director of FSR Climate has given me the chance to collaborate with the European Commission and contribute to fostering international cooperation among regulators of the main jurisdictions involved in our LIFE DICET project, namely California, China, EU, New Zealand, Switzerland and Quebec, as well as to involve a large network of relevant stakeholders. The experience of President at IAERE and Country Representative has enriched me personally and professionally, enhancing my collaborations with many colleagues of Italian institutions and other national Associations.
Should I be elected, I would ensure continuity of the impressive work that has been done so far by the previous EAERE Presidents while contributing with my own views and ideas for the future of the Association. In particular, I would like to serve the community in the following main ways:
- I would try to further reinforce the dialogue with policy makers and stakeholders, so as to increase the influence of the Association on the design and implementation of the policies. The next few years ahead of us might be decisive to achieve the international decarbonisation targets as well as to face many other challenges (e.g. water scarcity, biodiversity loss, distributional issues, deployment of green technologies, just to mention a few examples), and our Association should play an important role in the policy dialogue, giving expert views and key contributions to shape the correct policies. Some important steps have been taken for this purpose in the last few years (such as the Economists’ Statement on carbon pricing signed by over 1700 colleagues or the IPCC observer status recently obtained by EAERE), but more work remains to be done.
- I would support the creation of working groups on specific topics which are deemed particularly important within the community. The working groups could reinforce/develop collaborations within the community, create opportunities for joint international projects and/or Special Issues, and convey results of research to policy makers. The topics addressed by the working groups could be identified through a bottom-up process, for instance, through a call involving all EAERE members.
- I would aim to reinforce the collaboration across national associations within EAERE so as to identify common problems and related solutions, and promote joint initiatives and events. This could also help us increase our capacity to attract researchers and expand the number of members in those geographical areas that are currently under-represented in our Association. Moreover, I would like to develop collaborations with other scientific associations, including, but not limited to, the European Economic Association. In my view, this is particularly important to enhance the visibility of our own association among economists, but also to promote interdisciplinary scientific work and to increase the impact of our research across the different disciplines.
- I would launch what we could call a “Next Generation EAERE” program, favoring additional opportunities for young researchers and PhD students. They are the future of our Association, those who will have to lead us towards a climate neutral future in less than three decades. For this purpose, we need to promote and support more PhD Summer Schools for both theoretical and empirical young scholars, and more opportunities for EAERE supported small conferences in which they can present and meet experienced economists thus receiving valuable feedbacks to guide them during their early stages of their careers. I found similar experiences -organized at IAERE and the EUI in collaboration with a network of other universities- particularly enlightening, both for students and for teachers.
- Last but not least, I would try to further reinforce the already excellent communication tools we have at our disposal to increase the visibility and outreach of our community. This could also create fund raising opportunities, mobilizing resources from selected organizations and attracting international sponsorships to sustain EAERE after the pandemics. This could involve the publication of a communication blog, of podcasts and/or short video interviews to spread the results of our research and reach out to civil society so as to explain how we can contribute to problem solving in different areas that are investigated in our community.
If elected, I will put all my energy and enthusiasm into pursuing these goals which I do believe can be achieved by sharing views, identifying priorities and joining forces.”
Simone Borghesi is Director of the Florence School of Regulation – Climate (FSR Climate), part-time professor at the European University Institute and Professor of Environmental Economics at the Department of Political and International Sciences, University of Siena, Italy. He is Secretary General of the Policy Outreach Committee of EAERE. He is also Council Member of IAERE (Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists), member of CEPR-RPN (Center for Economic Policy and Research – Research and Policy Network), member of the Academic Advisory Council of CRM (Center on Regulation and Markets) of Brookings Institution, and Co-director of the research group R4S (Regulation for Sustainability) at the University of Siena. He has been President of IAERE in the period 2018-19.
He received a M.Sc. in Economics at University College London (1996) and a Ph.D. in Economics at the European University Institute (2001). He worked at the International Monetary Fund, Washington (1998), at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Milan (1999) and as Assistant Professor at the University of Pescara (2004-2008). He has been visiting scholar at INRA – Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique, Grenoble (2013), at the Department of Land Economy of the University of Cambridge (2015) and at the Centre of Economic Research of ETH, Zurich (2016).
He has been invited speaker at several plenary sessions of international conferences and institutions. In 2012 he was invited to the United Nations at the High-Level Meeting on “Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining A New Economic Paradigm”. He has been member and/or coordinator of several national and international projects and among the leading authors of the report “Pathways to deep decarbonization in Italy” (SDSN United Nations and IDDRI, Paris, 2015). In the period 2017-2018 he was the Director of the LIFE project SIDE (Supporting the Implementation and Development of the EU ETS), developed at EUI in collaboration with the European Commission. He currently directs at the European University Institute the LIFE project DICET (Deepening International Cooperation on Emission Trading) which involves the regulators of California, China, EU, New Zealand, Switzerland and Quebec.
He has been scientific organizer of numerous schools, workshops and international conferences, including the EUI Annual Climate Conference (since 2017), policy sessions at the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists and at EAERE Annual Conferences, and at the State of the Union (since 2018). He was member of the Organizing Committee of the 2011 EAERE Annual Conference.
He has published three books and over 80 articles in edited volumes and peer-reviewed international journals, including Ecological Economics, Energy Economics, Environment and Development Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Scandinavian Journal of Economics. His research focuses mainly on globalization and sustainability of development, economic growth and environmental degradation, emissions trading and climate change using both theoretical and empirical tools.
Valentina BOSETTI
Bocconi University and RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment
Italy
http://didattica.unibocconi.eu/mypage/index.php?IdUte=154318&idr=&lingua=eng
“The first time I attended an EAERE Conference was in Crete in 2000! I was a young PhD student mesmerized by the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas (and coffee, and drinks!) with a community of so many like-minded people, all under the same roof! All of a sudden I had found an academic home, one whose members I felt comfortable with and shared my research interests and attitudes towards life in general, more so than colleagues back at my university, or at other conferences (go to one on stochastic programming, and you will know what I mean…). From that moment on, this diverse, brilliant, sometimes weird but inevitably fun group of people, gave me a sense of belonging I rarely had felt before.
And besides taking me to wonderful places, several EAERE Conferences have brought other, sometimes unexpected, rewards: I have been offered my first job, I have met some of my best friends, I have learnt about the breadth of environmental economics, and I have first practiced Irish dancing (yes, Bremen!!). All the above have helped to make my career and my life much better. And for all of you who have had the luck to be part of this Association in past years, whether you enjoyed solving differential equations on a cocktail’s napkin or you found your perfect co-author in the crowd, you know what I am talking about.
Although we are about to take part in our second virtual Conference in a row, many of the opportunities this event offers require physical preference. While I am all in for cutting business travel to the bare minimum in our future lives, this is a natural exception. The idea of offsetting the environmental footprint of the event comes in handy (thanks, Gothenburg folks!).
So, within the limits of what will be possible in coming years, the Association should keep offering these unique opportunities to all young scholars who think economics should be about the welfare of all humans and the planet we inhabit, more than anything else.
Does this mean that I’d keep everything unchanged in the Association from its pre-COVID version, if I were elected? Well, all the good parts for sure. However, there is always room to learn from lessons past. For instance, I’d love for any other meeting related to Association to be held virtually in the future. I’d love to push even more to ensure funds for young PhD students who cannot afford to attend the Conference. I’d like to contribute to opening the Association to scholars who are not mainstream economists because I believe in the power of cross-fertilization and the danger of dogmas. I’d also like to help policymakers and stakeholders see the ideas emerging from our field and use them to steer our economies in a different direction.”
Valentina Bosetti is a full professor at Bocconi University teaching environmental and climate change economics. She is also a senior scientist at the RFF CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, and she currently serves as Chairwoman of Terna S.p.A, the Italian TSO. From 2003 to 2018 Valentina collaborated with Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
Bosetti is one of the lead authors of the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC (2014), and she will be a lead author of the 6th Assessment Report (WGIII).
Bosetti was the PI of an ERC Starting Grant on Innovation and clean technologies (ICARUS) and of a second ERC Starting Grant on Uncertainty and Climate Change (RISICO). She published work on integrated assessment modelling, climate change policies and climate change perception, carbon-free technologies.
Bosetti served as president of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economics (IAERE) and a council member of the European one (EAERE).
Enrica DE CIAN
Ca’ Foscari Unversity of Venice, Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, and RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment
Italy
“EAERE annual conferences and summer schools have been milestones for my career, as they have also been for career of other people – at that time students like me – that today are still part of the community and have become friends and colleagues. If elected, I will contribute to the activities of the Association so that students and young researchers today can enjoy the same opportunities I had.
EAERE is a community of scholars and scientists that contribute to real-world policy making through rigorous economic analyses. If elected, I will ensure the EAERE activities will continue to combine high relevance, and contribute to address the major challenges of our time, with high quality and rigor in approaches and methods.
During my experience as researcher, professor, and leader of an ERC-funded research team, I had the opportunity to being exposed to many of the methods our discipline uses, from modelling tools to econometric analyses, and therefore I believe I have the knowledge and the expertise to play a more active role in the Association.”
Enrica De Cian is associate professor in environmental economics at Ca’ Foscari Unversity of Venice (Italy), research scientist at Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC), and at RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment.
She is an ERC Starting Grant grantee with the project ENERGYA – Energy use for Adaptation. At Ca’ Foscari University she coordinates the PhD programme in Science and Management of Climate Change. Before she was researcher at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) for ten years. She has collaborated with several research organizations in Europe (CEPS, ZEW) and in the U.S. (Joint Program at MIT, Boston University). Her research focuses on the global impacts of climate change on the economy, the society, and sustainable development. She has been working with integrated assessment models, economic models, econometric and statistical approaches to study adaptation to climate change in the context of the energy transition.
“EAERE is a great scholarly community which combines societal relevance, high quality, and a wonderful crowd of people. I would have loved to welcome all of you personally at the EAERE conference in Berlin. Now, with having the honour to co-chair the conference in online mode for the second time, I enjoyed seeing more of the association’s great work behind the scenes, but also many new people contributing. Although some say we are too biased towards research on climate change, which is possibly correct, I also noticed a broadening of the methods, approaches and topics covered, and of the epistemic communities involved. I would be happy if I could, as a council member, contribute both to sustaining our quality standards and opening our perspectives.”
Klaus Eisenack is professor for resource economics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is known for his research on adaptation to climate change, climate governance, and the energy transition. His research focuses on the governance of path dependence and new archetypes of cooperation, with modelling of institutional arrangements and the analysis of natural resource games being further research interests. He was professor for economics at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany (2008-2016), and scientist at PIK (2001-2008). He co-chaired the EAERE 2020 and EAERE 2021 conference (with Carolyn Fischer, Maria Loureiro and Anne-Sophie Crépin). He is member of the strategic group of the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (since 2018), and was head of the Oldenburg Center for Sustainability Economics and Management (2012-2016). Since 2011, he has been visiting scholar at the Ostrom Workshop. He led the Chameleon Research Group on adapting infrastructure to climate change (2008-2014), and is active in public understanding of science (in particular with the climate change game Keep Cool). He has a background in mathematics, economics and philosophy, and holds a PhD in mathematics from the Free University Berlin (2006).
Mads GREAKER
Oslo Business School and Statistics Norway
Norway
“My road into research on environmental and resource economics has been longer and more winding than normal. For many years after my Master of Science degree I worked for a large multinational in Norway with marketing of various detergents. This caught my interest in environmental policy, and at the age of 30, I decided to go back to the university to study economics. I still remember my first EAERE conference in Oslo 1999 with great joy. The welcoming atmosphere and intellectual brilliance that unfolded in the various sessions totally enchanted me. Now, I am deeply honored to be nominated as a council member of the same organization that organized the Oslo 1999 event. As a council member I will contribute my best to the continued success of the yearly EAERE conferences. Moreover, I will with great interest engage in the good work being done to increase outreach beyond academia. Finally, I will never forget to keep an eye out for all the engaged and hardworking PhD students in our field. The winter and summer schools are excellent occasions for them to meet others in the same situation, learn new theories and methods and to get a chance to present and receive comments on their work.”
Mads Greaker is a professor in economics at Oslo Business School and a part-time senior researcher at Statistics Norway. He holds a Master of Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and a PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo. Having defended his PhD, he started working for the Research Department at Statistics Norway. From 2004 to 2013 he also had a part time position at the Gothenburg University doing both teaching and research. During 2015 Mads was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and in 2018 he started as a full-time professor at Oslo Business School. Mads research interests are manifold. The recent years he has been particularly intrigued by the concepts of path dependency and technology lock-in. Together with his PhD student, this earned him the Erik Kempe Prize for an article on indirect network effects and clean technologies. Mads has continued to work on these concepts also looking at directed technical change and policy commitment failures as a source of path dependency and technology lock-in. Among other research interests are: biodiversity off-set markets, energy markets with intermittent energy, trade and the environment, and then in particular the Porter hypothesis. Mads has during his career worked closely with policy makers. Recently, he has been involved as an expert witness in the Norwegian high court case about further petroleum exploration in the arctic. Moreover, he was a part of the commission that designed the new CO2-tax scheme for the Norwegian fishing fleet, and he has been working closely with the commission proposing resource rent taxation of Norwegian aquaculture.
“EAERE was founded in 1990, right before I started university. As I was starting my PhD in Gothenburg in 1996, I was introduced to a small group of researchers devoted to environmental and resource economics lead by Professor Thomas Sterner. Joining this vivid and fun research group was one of my life’s best decisions. I have since then focused my research on regulatory design and consequences of climate policy, and I have had the privilege to inform and support decision makers in various contexts. Policy-research interaction is something I strongly support – during the WCERE 2018 in Gothenburg (for which I was the chief operating officer), we organized a pre-conference “Supply and Demand of Environmental Economic Policy Advice” which included small workshops matching researchers and policy makers. I believe that the EAERE and WCERE conferences provide an important platform for meeting and discussing the latest research within our field as well as an opportunity to engage with policy makers and colleagues from other fields. If I am elected as a member to the Council, I would like to further develop how our conferences can support policy-researcher interaction.”
Åsa Löfgren is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on climate change and efficient environmental regulation including behavioral aspects and distributional outcomes of climate policies. Löfgren is principal investigator and part of the management teams of the Mistra Carbon Exit Research Program and the interdisciplinary Centre for Collective Action Research (CeCAR) at the University of Gothenburg. Löfgren has served as a council member of the Swedish Climate Policy Council tasked with evaluating if the Swedish Government’s overall policy is aligned with the Swedish climate target of no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. She is currently a member of the advisory council to the director general of the Swedish Energy Agency. Löfgren was chief operating officer for the 6th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists 2018, member of the scientific committee and local organizer committee of the 16th Annual EAERE conference and is currently member of the World Council of Environmental and Resource Economists Associations (WCEREA). Löfgren has published her work in international peer-reviewed journals including ERE and REEP, as well as book chapters, policy papers, and reports.
