Valeria Costantini
Roma Tre University
Department of Economics

Valeria Costantini

I am honoured to be one of the IAERE candidates for President-elect. I am grateful to the Nominating Committee for this chance.
I have been working on environmental and energy economics for several years, and I am glad to see the growing attention the Italian scientific community is dedicating to environment-related issues. The increase in relevance and coverage of different topics that IAERE members have been addressing in policy and academic frameworks is pushing forward the key role of the Association.
I acknowledge that past and current Presidents and Council members have worked constantly to widen the audience of the Annual Conference, also involving several foreign scholars. Additional highly qualified initiatives, such as (among others) seminars, the special sessions organised within the Annual Conference of the Italian Economic Association and the post-graduate IAERE School, have been gradually and successfully introduced over time.
After such efforts, I consider the first duty of future Presidents to manage this priceless heritage and sustain the ongoing activities.
Space for marginal improvements is anyway always possible. My ideal agenda would include the creation of a network of PhD programmes and students focused on disciplines broadly associated to climate change, energy markets and technologies, environment and resource management, to help facilitating knowledge exchange and team working. A second, equally important, objective would be the promotion of a deeper interdisciplinary approach into the Italian university system. I also think it would be crucial to reinforce the role of IAERE as a relevant stakeholder in the policy discourse related to planning and managing resources under the different recovery strategies. These objectives require, as one of the needed steps, an endeavour to increase the national and international visibility of IAERE, to attract new members and to enlarge the targeted audience.
My wish is that environmental and resource economics will become more and more a key discipline in training future entrepreneurs, researchers, teachers and most importantly civil servants and policy makers, to diffuse a sustainability-oriented thinking in all strategic and daily decisions and behaviours.

Anna Montini

Dear, as we know IAERE is a young environmental economists association. It has grown a lot its group of members as well as its potentiality, since the very first years of the Association. However, both the context and the public opinion towards the environment and the natural resources have, luckily, changed a lot during the last few years.
A lot of valuable work has been done by the current and the previous presidents - and council members, of course - to create a bridge between the academy and the society.
It is time to continue this work, to improve the network between academic research, teaching activities, institutions, firms, even when simply considering internship opportunities of the students that are following degree courses in the field of the natural resource and environment economics.
One of the aims is to create a strong relationship among teaching, research activities and future job opportunities. Our society needs a new generation of decision makers, at every level, who take into account the environment more than in the past. Such a bridge is also necessary, inside the Academy, to create interdisciplinary groups of research.
I am honoured to be one of the candidates for the IAERE Presidency and I am going to work in the future for the association in any case. I thank the Nominating Committee for this opportunity.

Sabrina Auci

I am very thankful to have been nominated as a candidate for the IAERE board. Should I be elected as a member of the board of IAERE, first of all, I would like to promote opportunities and meetings in Southern Italian universities, such as that of Palermo, where I have been commuting from Rome for several years. Our issues have so far had little hold in these geographical areas of our country and, therefore, promoting the diffusion among scholars in the academic and non-academic fields, through the organization of summer schools, seminars, etc., could bear good fruit. In addition, I would support the actions of the board to increase the visibility and strengthen the ties of the association not only with economic institutions of the country (Istat, Ministry of Environment) but also with other national institutions (FEEM, CMCC, SIE, AIEAA, ENEA), or international (EAERE, EEA). Finally, I would support any initiative that would lead to an intense exchange with scholars from different scientific fields, such as natural sciences, biology, engineering, because many issues are intersecting. I think that, for example, the discussion of environmental issues like biodiversity, management of air pollution, and fresh and saltwater could be enriched by different points of view.

Shouro Dasgupta

It is a privilege for me to be a candidate for IAERE council member. I am thankful to the nominating committee for this opportunity. I have cherished being a part of the association since our inception in 2013. I have also been the Editor of the IAERE newsletter for the last three years, allowing me to work side-by-side with the council and members. The contribution of IAERE members in academia and policymaking is a testament to the influence of our community in the fields of environmental, energy, and resource economics. I am grateful for the diligent work of the current and past Presidents and Council members in improving the association’s outreach, from PhD students to the top scholars. The organisation and expansion of the annual conferences and the wonderful seminars being hosted during the pandemic is highly commendable.
I plan to carry on with the platform and increase the profile of IAERE both nationally and internationally, which will allow us to promote the association to a wider audience. I believe that IAERE can help integrate environmental and resource economics in the Italian universities, with the aim of having a dedicated scientific disciplinary area and including journals that cater to our discipline in the list of Class A scientific journals. Another objective for me would be work closely with PhD programmes to encourage students to be more involved and benefit from the activities of the association.    

Claudia Ghisetti

Delighted to have been nominated as a candidate to run for the election as one of the ordinary members of the IAERE Council, I am very pleased to be given the opportunity to serve this association to the best I can do.
IAERE has been the first conference I attended in my carrier, in which I presented my first conference paper during my PhD  and I can still remember not only the joy of that moment but most importantly the richness of the comments I received on that and on the next papers I presented in the annual conferences, which made be grow. What I have always appreciated, and I would like to continue working on about IAERE, is the attention given to young scholars: since my first presentation at IAERE (when I was definitely a young scholar) I have always noticed the particular (and not so common in other contexts) attention that each participant has tried to give to young scholars, providing fruitful comments and enriching a stimulating debate over their works. Past Presidents and Council Members have strongly worked in this direction and as a matter of fact, we can already observe a wide and active participation of the new environmental economists to this context, not only to the conference and to the Young Economist Best Paper Award (which I once had the extreme pleasure to co-win with my colleague Shouro) but also to its schools. I further acknowledge and appreciate the wider and increasing the international audience of the Association, facilitated by the outstanding initiatives that it organized. I would like to continue the work of my predecessors in this direction to further increase its internationalization and its external visibility, which can be also pursued by reinforcing the occasions for networking and interacting on specific research (evaluating the possibility to launch internal short webinars for our members) and on funding (facilitating the networking when it comes to joint participation to national or international projects). As sustainability science requires by definition multidisciplinary lenses, my hope is that first this community will reach soon a higher level of integration across its different lines of research and scientific approaches, and I will work to promote such transition and second, that this community can enlarge its scopes to further dialogue with non-academic stakeholders to foster an increasingly active science-driven policy making.

Edilio Valentini

Now more than ever, the urgency of environmental challenges is clear and widespread. Research by environmental and resource economists can help towards a full understanding of losses from natural impacts, benefits from action, and can contribute to improve policy makers' 
awareness in their decisions. We can contribute in these directions at least in two ways: by promoting our research within and beyond our association, and by increasing the visibility of our research results, creating new opportunities for meetings, networking and scientific collaborations. I find these perspectives compelling, and I would be very pleased to give my time and help IAERE in pursuing them.