Mike Young

Mike holds a Research Chair in Water Economics and Management at the University of Adelaide, was the Founding Executive Director of its Environment Institute, is a Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. A Member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, in 2006, Mike Young was awarded Australia’s premiere water research prize ‘ the Land and Water Australia Eureka Award for Water Research. He has completed leading preparation of a chapter on global water management for a UNEP report on Green Economies. Mike spent 30 years with CSIRO where amongst other things he established their Policy and Economic Research Unit with offices in Adelaide, Canberra and Perth. In 2003, Mike was awarded a Centenary Medal ‘for outstanding service through environmental economics’. In 2009, he was named South Australian of the Year in the Environment Category. He has been Associate Editor of Ecological Economics and is a member of twelve editorial boards. Mike is a current member of the Global Water Partnership’s technical committee and leads the water component of a recent UNEP study into Green growth strategies throughout the world. He is best known for his work on the use and design of market- based instruments. He was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard where he led studies into transformational change strategies and published a book on this subject among more than 240 published papers.

Involved in:

• Webinar: Water reform planning – a ‘wicked problem’ (September 2019)