Alejandro López-Feldman

President 

Alejandro is Professor at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. He has a Master (2003) and a PhD (2006) in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis. Alejandro’s main research areas are Environment and Development Economics. In his research he has analyzed the role that agriculture and natural resources play in the well-being of rural households. He has also looked at the effect that migration and remittances have on rural household livelihoods and on their relationship with their natural surroundings. He is currently doing research on the impacts of climate change on rural households as well as on the relationship between various environmental indicators and health.

Alejandro’s research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, World Development, Ecological Economics, Environment and Development Economics, Agricultural Economics, Environmental Science and Policy, and Journal of Development Studies, among others. Since 2015 he has been part of the Advisory Committee in charge of evaluating Mexico’s climate change policy. He has served as consultant to CEPAL, IADB, UNDP, World Bank, WWF, and various Ministries and offices of the Mexican Federal Government. He is Associate Editor of Environment and Development Economics.

Jorge Maldonado

President Elect

Jorge is full professor in the Department of Economics at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). He was also director of the Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program (LACEEP). His main research interests are economics applied to environment, natural resources and development, in particular in the nexus with poverty and livelihoods. He has published in different journals such as Ecological Economics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, World Development, Environment and Development Economics, among others. He teaches environmental economics, natural resource economics, and microeconomics at both undergrad and graduate level. Currently, he is the director of the project Conditional Cash Transfers and Rural Development in Latin America (www.sinergiasrurales.info), funded by IFAD, and general coordinator of the platform of evaluation and learning of graduation programs in Latin America (www.plataformagraduacionla.info), funded by Ford Foundation, IDRC and Fundación Capital. Jorge is also the editor of the journal Desarrollo y Sociedad (https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/journal/dys).

Rodrigo Arriagada

Past president

PhD in Environmental and Resource Economics and MSc in Natural Resources from North Carolina State University.
Currently he is assistant professor at the Department of Ecosystems and Environment from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is also Director of the Millennium Nucleus Center for the Socioeconomic Impact of Environmental Policies (http://www.cesiep.cl). His research fields include impact evaluation of environmental policies, land use change modelling, economics of ecosystem services and the study of the interconnections between environment and development.

Claudia Aravena

Secretary

Claudia Aravena is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and the Centre for Energy Economics Research and Policy (CEERP) at Heriot Watt University, United Kingdom (UK). Claudia is an economist with expertise in the areas of Energy, Environmental and Behavioural Economics. She has a PhD in Energy and Environmental Economics from Queen’s University Belfast, UK; a certificate in Sustainable Development from University College Dublin and a MSc in Environmental and Resource Economics from Universidad de Concepcion-Chile, where she also obtained her BA in Economics. She has previously been an adjunct lecturer and research fellow at the Department of Economics in Trinity College Dublin, the UCD Smurfit Business School, the Department of Engineering at University College Dublin (UCD) (Ireland) and the Department of Economics at Universidad de Concepcion. She was the Mäler Scholar 2016 in the Beijer Institute at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and part of the Scientific Committee of LACEEP until 2017.

Claudia has worked extensively with interdisciplinary groups in the areas of energy, environmental and behavioural economics. Her main expertise and research interests are in the fields of environmental valuation, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, smart grids, consumer behaviour, renewable energy sources, energy and environmental policy and sustainable development. She is currently working in projects in both developed and developing countries. Her work has been published in a number of journals including Energy Economics, Land Economics, IEEE Power and Energy and Energy Policy.

Óscar Melo

Treasurer
Óscar Melo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Agricultural Economics, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He holds a PhD and MSc in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He was Director of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Universidad Católica, from 2008 to 2014. He is currently a member of the Center for Global Change and the Water Law and Management Center, both at Universidad Católica. His research interests are water economics, climate change, quality and regulation, economic valuation and agricultural trade and development. He is currently conducting research on adapting water utility regulation to climate change and on cooperation, collective action and conflict in water users’ associations under water scarcity.

Francisco Alpízar

Francisco Alpízar is a senior research fellow at the Economics and Environment for Development Research Program at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), a leading multilateral research institute based in Costa Rica. He is also Associate Professor of Economics at University of Gothenburg. In 2005, he founded and directed the Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program.

Alpizar’s work has explored incentive based approaches to generate improved private and public management and use of natural resource with a particular focus on climate change and developing countries. He has undertaken studies using behavioral, experimental and nonmarket valuation methods. Alpizar has also done work on payments for ecosystem services and the management of natural protected areas with an emphasis on interactions with local communities. His work appears in a number of journals including: Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Environmental and Resource Economics, Ecological Economics, and World Development. Alpizar is currently an international advisor to the Center for Collective Action Research, at University of Gothenburg, and has been Associate Editor of World Development and Guest Editor at Environmental and Development Economics. He has served as a consultant to the Global Environmental Fund, Inter-American Development Bank, IUCN, Nature Conservancy, United Nations Development Program, World Bank, and the World Wildlife Federation, among others.

Marcelo Caffera

Marcelo Caffera holds a Ph.D. in Natural Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2004). He works at the University of Montevideo, Uruguay. There, he divides his time between research, teaching and coordinating the undergraduate program in economics. Marcelo published his work in journals such as Environmental and Resource Economics, Environmental Health Perspectives, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, Environment and Development Economics and Mathematical Social Sciences. As a consultant, Marcelo worked for the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and the International Development Research Center in Canada; as well as private firms.

Danae Hernández-Cortés

Danae is an Economics PhD candidate in the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked in several projects with the Environmental Markets and Solutions lab (emLab) at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management where she has analyzed the impact of environmental policies on environmental justice. Before doing her PhD she obtained her B.A. in Economics at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. Danae is interested in the distributional effects of environmental policy as well as the impact of pollution on health and labor outcomes.

Rocío Moreno-Sánchez

Rocío got a joint Master of Science degree in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at Universidad de Los Andes and the University of Maryland and a Master of Science degree in Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University. She has worked for about 20 years in several topics of environmental, agricultural, and natural resource economics, focusing, particularly, on issues related to poverty alleviation and the use of resources by local communities. During the last ten years, Rocío has been working on several projects with local communities combining qualitative and quantitative analytical tools and using multidisciplinary approaches. Rocio has worked as a tutor for the fellowship program for junior researchers at the Conservation Strategy Fund. Currently, she works as an advisor for projects involving local communities at the Economics Department of Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She has published in journals such as World Development, Ecological Economics, Ecology and Society, Ambio, Environment and Development Economics, and PlosOne.

Felipe Vásquez Lavín

Felipe Vásquez Lavín holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, a master’s degree in Environmental and Resource Economics and a Bachelor Degree in Economics, both from Universidad de Concepción, Chile. He is Senior Research Fellow for the Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative (Chile) and associate researcher for the Center for the Study of Multiple-Drivers on Marine Socio-Ecological Systems funded. He has been member of the Scientific Committee of the Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program (LACEEP) and Senior Technical Advisors for Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF).

His areas of research are Economics of Climate Change, Water Resources, Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Health Economics. He has published research article in journal as Value in Health, Climatic Change, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Environmental Management, AMBIO, Water Resource Management, Water Resources Research, Environmental Research Letters, Ocean and Coastal Management, Regional Environmental Change, Marine Resource Economics, International Journal for Equity in Health, among others. He has served as a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the Chilean Ministries of Environment, Social Development and Health, among others.