About Jonah Busch, Ph.D.
Jonah Busch, Ph.D. is an environmental economist who researches climate change and tropical deforestation.
Dr. Busch has published more than forty scientific articles on climate, forests, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development in journals including Science, Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics, and Environmental Research Letters. He is the co-author of the book Why Forests? Why Now? The Science, Economics, and Politics of Tropical Forests and Climate Change. He has also published on the economics of penguins, pandas, and surfers.
Busch has advised on the design of climate and forest finance mechanisms for governments and institutions including the President of Guyana, the governments of Indonesia, Norway, Bolivia, and California, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Global Environment Facility, Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, and Green Climate Fund. He serves on the editorial board of Conservation Letters.
Previously, Busch was Climate Economics Fellow at Conservation International, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and Chief Economist at Earth Innovation Institute. He has been a lecturer (adjunct professor) at Columbia University's Earth Institute; a visiting scholar at Zhejiang University and University of California, Berkeley; and a high school math teacher in the Peace Corps (Burkina Faso, '00-'02). He holds a B.A. in math, geography, and environmental studies from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in economics and environmental science from University of California, Santa Barbara. He speaks French, Spanish, Indonesian, Mooré, and Mandarin Chinese with varying degrees of proficiency.
