Plenary Speakers

Graciela Chichilnisky, Global Thermostat

Graciela Chichilnisky is a Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics, a University Senator at Columbia University, and Director of the Columbia Consortium for Risk Management. She was a UNESCO Professor of Mathematics and Economics from 1995 to 2008, and is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. She is the author of fifteen books and some 320 scientific articles in preeminent academic journals.

She proposed and designed the carbon credit emissions trading market underlying the Kyoto Protocol, and was a lead author on the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Prize. She is CEO and co-founder of the recently launched Global Thermostat, a company that designs and creates renewable energy plants capable of capturing CO2 in conjunction with heavy industrial processes. In 2015, the Silicon Valley magazine Fast Company selected Global Thermostat as one of the “World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies” in energy.

Maria Damanaki, The Nature Conservancy

Maria Damanaki is Global Managing Director of Oceans at The Nature Conservancy. She leads a global team focused on how the world manages its oceans, including sustainable fisheries management, protection and restoration of coral reefs and other ecosystems, coastal resilience, and mapping and quantification of the full value of the world’s oceans to people.

From 2010 – 2014, she served as the EU Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, during which time the EU was able  to bring fish populations back to healthier levels. She also intro- duced and implemented the Blue Growth agenda for Seas and Oceans in Europe, and established legislation to create a common framework for Marine Spatial Planning.  Before that she served as  a member of the Greek Parliament for over 25 years, and was the youngest-ever Member of Parliament when she was first elected. She was also the first woman to lead a political party in Greece.

Massimo Marinacci, Bocconi University

Massimo Marinacci is Professor and Chair in the Department of Decision Sciences at Università Bocconi, and holds the AXA-Bocconi Chair in Risk. He is also a Fellow at the Bocconi IGIER Research Center and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He taught previously at the Università di Torino, the Università di Bologna and the University of Toronto.

He has done path-breaking research in decision making under uncertainty and has numerous publications in top level journals  such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies and Journal of Economic Theory. He is currently the principal investigator of the European Research Council funded Advanced Grant entitled “Individual decisions and macroeconomic robustness” (2015-2019) and was previously the principal investigator for the ERC Advanced Grant, “Bounded Rationality and Social Concerns in Decision Processes: Theory, Experiments, and Applications” (2009-2013). He serves as Associate Editor of the journals Econometrica, Economics and Philosophy, Journal of Economic Theory, and Management Science.

Karine Nyborg, University of Oslo 

Karine Nyborg is a Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo and an IZA Fellow. She is Chair of the Scientific Board of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and an Academic Expert for Denmark’s Environmental Economic Council. She has served as a Scientific Advisor at the Ragnar Frisch Centre of Economic Research. In 2012-2013, she served as President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

In 2002 she won the Erik Kempe Award for the best European paper in environmental and resource economics; she also won the Artikkelprisen in 2003, for the best paper in the journals of the Norwegian Economists’ Association. She is on the Editorial Board  of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Her research interests include environmental economics, behavioral economics, and economic analysis of social and moral norms. She is also a successful fiction writer.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is was Director of the Earth Institute, 2002-2016. He was Special Advisor to former United Nations Secretary-Generals Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He is also one of the Secretary-General’s MDG Advocates, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.