Plenary Speaker

Robert Costanza

Dr. Robert Costanza is University Professor of Sustainability and Director, Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University (www.pdx.edu/sustainability). Before moving to PSU in Sept. 2010, he was the Gund Professor of Ecological Economics and founding director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. Before Vermont, he was on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Louisiana State University and a visiting scientist at the Beijer Institute in Sweden and the Illinois Natural History Survey. Dr. Costanza is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at Ecological Economics Research Center New Zealand (EERNZ), Massey University, New Zealand, a Senior Fellow at the National Council on Science and the Environment, Washington, DC, and a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm, Sweden.

Dr. Costanza received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Architecture and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering Sciences (Systems Ecology with Economics minor) from the University of Florida. His transdisciplinary research integrates the study of humans and the rest of nature to address research, policy and management issues at multiple time and space scales, from small watersheds to the global system. He is co-founder and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and was chief editor of the Ecological Economics from its inception in 1989 until 2002. He is founding co-editor (with Karin Limburg and Ida Kubiszewski) of Reviews in Ecological Economics and currently serves on the editorial board of ten other international academic journals. He is also founding editor-in-chief of Solutions, a new hybrid academic/popular journal.

Dr. Costanza is the author or co-author of over 400 scientific papers and 22 books. His work has been cited in more than 7,000 scientific articles and he has been named one of ISI’s Highly Cited Researchers since 2004. More than 200 interviews and reports on his work have appeared in various popular media.

His awards include a Kellogg National Fellowship, the Society for Conservation Biology Distinguished Achievement Award, a Pew Scholarship in Conservation and the Environment, the Kenneth Boulding Memorial Award for Outstanding Contributions in Ecological Economics, and honorary doctorates from Stockholm University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.

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