Richard Howarth

Richard B. Howarth is the Rosenwald Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College and the Editor-in-Chief of Ecological Economics. His work centers on the normative dimensions of environmental issues with applications to topics such as energy use, climate change, and ecological conservation. He is committed to the view that rigorous economic analysis is essential in understanding the causes of environmental problems and designing solutions that effectively balance the multiple objectives of environmental policy. At the same time, environmental issues have moral, behavioral, social, and ecological dimensions that are sometimes in tension with the assumptions of textbook economics. This highlights the need to integrate economics with a cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approach to environmental governance.

Professor Howarth received degrees from the Biology and Society Program at Cornell (A.B., 1985) and the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.S., 1987). He completed his Ph.D. at the Energy and Resources Program at the University of California at Berkeley (1990), where his work focused on international comparisons of energy-use trends and the economics of sustainable development. Prior to his appointment at Dartmouth College, he held positions at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1990-1993) and the University of California at Santa Cruz (1993-1998).