Graciela Chichilnisky is the UNESCO Professor of Mathematics and Economics at Columbia University, New York. With PHDs in both Mathematics and Economics, she was the originator of the carbon market of the Kyoto Protocol that was voted by 163 nations in 1997 and became international law in 2006, a world leader in efforts to combat climate change. Her pioneering work uses market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions and improve the lot of the poor. She does research writes and speaks extensively on globalization and the global environment.
Chichilnisky was the author of the now widely used concept of Basic Needs in economic development, voted by 153 nations at the 1993 Earth Summit to be the cornerstone of Sustainable Development work. She designed financial instruments called Catastrophe Bundles and created an entire new mathematical foundation for decisions involving catastrophic risks and for social choices and policy decisions involving the long-term future. At her keynote address to the World Bank Annual Meeting of 1996 she proposed the creation of an International Bank for Environmental Settlements to regulate the world's carbon market, and in Bali in December 2007 she was invited by the Chair of the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism to propose a policy successor to the Kyoto Protocol - involving carbon negative power plants and new derivative markets - to provide simple and practical solutions to resolving the impasse between China and the United States in today's Climate Change crisis.
Source: http://www.chichilnisky.com/
24/06/2008