Elizabeth Robinson

Director, Grantham Research Institute LSE

Elizabeth Robinson

Professor Elizabeth Robinson joined the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, as its Director, in September 2021.

Elizabeth is an environmental economist with over twenty five years’ experience undertaking research particularly in lower-income countries, including six while living in Tanzania and Ghana. Her research addresses the design of policies and institutions to reduce climate change emissions, protect the environment, and improve the livelihoods of resource-dependent communities. She works on climate change and systemic risk; and tracking the co-benefits of climate change mitigation and health, oriented particularly around food security and food systems. From 2004-09 she was coordinating lead author for the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, sub-Saharan Africa. She was on the UK Defra Economic Advisory Panel for five years; and in 2019-20, Specialist Advisor to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Food, Poverty, Health, and Environment. She is Working Group 1 lead for the Lancet Countdown, that addresses climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability.

Background

Before joining the Grantham Research Institute at LSE in 2021, Elizabeth worked at the University of Reading for ten years, and prior to that she has variously worked at the Boston Consulting Group, the World Bank, Rockefeller Foundation, Natural Resources Institute, and as a tutorial fellow in economics at the University of Oxford.

Research interests

  • The design of environmental policy instruments
  • Climate change and health
  • Climate change and food security