Biographical Information

Joshua Goldstein earned his IPER PhD in June 2007. His dissertation, ""Paying for Conservation in Human-dominated Landscapes,"" contributed to the emerging field of conservation finance and helped to identify innovative financial incentives and policy mechanisms to make conservation economically attractive and commonplace. Josh is currently an Assistant Professor of Ecological Economics in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. In his new position, he is developing a research and teaching program related to ecosystem services and conservation finance. Josh’s dissertation research combined ecological and economic information to guide investments in conserving biodiversity and supplying ecosystem services from working lands. Drawing upon case studies from Hawai’i, he focused on: (1) identifying business strategies to make native reforestation projects economically attractive for private landowners, (2) applying a return-on-investment framework to identify which investments in ecological restoration provide the greatest conservation “return” per dollar invested, and (3) developing financial strategies to pay for landscape-scale restoration projects. For this work, Josh collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, economists, and legal scholars, as well as colleagues from The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, public agencies, and private landowners. His research contributed to our understanding of how conservation groups can work in partnership with private landowners and conservation investors to develop projects that are attractive and beneficial to all participants. His dissertation research has been published in PNAS and Conservation Letters, and he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2004, which supported his graduate education at Stanford. Prior to starting in IPER, Josh received a B.A. with highest honors in biology from Williams College. He also worked for two years at The Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA as a research assistant on the Plum Island Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research project.