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REPORT 
 

A Report on the 14th Annual Meeting of the 
Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative  
 

Tanay Raj Bhatt,  Vidisha Chowdhury,  and E. Somanathan  
 
The 14th Annual Meeting of the Environment for Development (EfD) 
Initiative (https://efdinitiative.org/) was held virtually during 16–20 
November 2020. The EfD Annual Meeting is an integral part of the EfD 
Initiative’s commitment to quality research and active interaction, focusing 
on the application of environmental economics in the Global South. It 
brings together researchers from various EfD centres, their collaborators, 
and other key stakeholders for the exchange of research ideas, discussion of 
research proposals, and presentation of results from EfD projects.  

The five-day event included four keynote addresses by eminent scholars 
which focused on specific issues within the realms of environmental, 
agricultural, and gender economics.  

The keynote address on the first day was delivered by Urvashi Narain, 
senior environmental economist of the World Bank. She described the 
World Bank’s research on air pollution, now considered the greatest public 
health problem at the global level. Environmental economists at the World 
Bank have developed a methodology for assigning monetary value to the 
loss of life and risks to health from pollution, which governments can use 
to evaluate mortality and health damages from air pollution against the 
costs imposed by regulations to curb air pollution. The cost of air pollution 

                                                           
 Centre for Research on the Economics of Climate, Food, Energy, and Environment 
(CECFEE), Indian Statistical Institute; 7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg, New Delhi 110016, India; 
bhatt97.trb@gmail.com. 

 CECFEE; vidishachowdhury2@gmail.com. 

 CECFEE; som@isid.ac.in.  

Copyright © Bhatt, Chowdhury and Somanathan 2021. Released under Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.373 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i1.373


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [158] 

was estimated at about 10% of the GDP in China, and about 8% of the 
GDP in India, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia, based on data from 2013. 

The second keynote address was delivered by Menale Kassie of the 
International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology on adoption of new 
technologies for sustainable development. In particular, Kassie focused on 
how research on insects holds the key to green development. He discussed 
state-of-the-art research in this area that provides evidence on how 
substituting fishmeal or soy-based animal feed with insects would be a 
Pareto improvement. Not only is the insect-based feed more cost-efficient, 
but evidence also indicates that farm animals that are provided with insect-
based feed yield much more output (eggs, pig meat, etc.). This has 
important implications since, as Kassie argued, animal feed accounts for up 
to 60–70% of production costs in the industry. Moreover, compared to 
traditional feed, the emissions intensity of insect-based feed is far lower. In 
addition to animal feed, insects can also be used to manufacture fertilizers, 
which have been shown to be at least as effective as traditional fertilizers. In 
fact, the high protein content of insects and the minimal resource 
requirement of insect farming make it ideal for sustainably tackling the 
problem of global malnutrition. In conclusion, Kassie mentioned that the 
socio-economic impacts of investing in insects are likely to be massive, 
contributing to poverty alleviation, lowering emissions, improving waste 
management, boosting employment generation, and increasing savings. 

On the third day, Jan Steckel from the Mercator Research Institute on 
Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) highlighted the growing 
need for research on emissions pricing in low-income countries and factors 
that shape its feasibility. From a climate perspective, rising energy demands 
in poor countries and their growing contribution to global emissions call for 
such climate policies. From an economic point of view, carbon taxes have 
the potential to generate significant revenues that could be used to lower 
other distortionary taxes, increase public investment, and support 
disproportionately affected communities. However, a major challenge 
facing emissions pricing, as Jan pointed out, is the lack of public 
acceptance. He emphasized that the political acceptability of such policies is 
governed by people’s perceptions about their distributional effects, impacts 
on individual freedom, and effectiveness. Social norms and political 
background may also play a major role in shaping public opinion. 

The keynote speech on the fourth day approached climate change through 
a gender lens. In her keynote address, Farzana Afridi from the Indian 
Statistical Institute, Delhi, discussed the gender-differentiated impacts of 
technological shocks and extreme weather conditions on labour usage. She 
emphasized that the effect of technological change or shocks on women 



[159] Tanay Raj Bhatt, Vidisha Chowdhury, and E. Somanathan 

 

can vary between the home and market; indeed, there exists a gender-based 
division of labour such that women bear a disproportionate burden of the 
domestic work. Using empirical findings from her recent work, she showed 
that while productivity-enhancing cooking technologies, such as liquefied 
petroleum gas (LPG), can improve women’s welfare, farm mechanization 
that reduces the need for manual weeding may adversely affect women, 
rendering their labour redundant. In the case of negative production shocks 
such as droughts, women’s farm labour and earnings reduce significantly 
relative to those of men, and the former are less likely to migrate. 
Consequently, such shocks can exacerbate earnings and labour market 
inequalities between men and women. Formulating policies to respond to 
such gender-differentiated impacts requires reskilling the female workforce, 
ensuring safe mobility, and improving women’s access to work.  

Each day of the meeting had five parallel presentation sessions in which 
participants discussed around 80 research papers and 15 research proposals. 
These covered EfD thematic areas such as agriculture, air quality, 
biodiversity, carbon pricing, climate change, conservation, energy, 
experiments, fisheries, forestry, gender, health, land, policy design, urban 
spaces, waste, and water. Amongst these, some papers investigated the 
impacts of climate change on crop yields and labour productivity; others 
looked at the effects of clean cooking fuels such as electricity and LPG on 
air quality and health; a few analysed factors driving sustainability in 
fisheries; and some explored how climatic, institutional, and economic 
factors influence COVID-19 morbidity. 

The general assembly on the final day began with an address by Pam 
Fredman, President of the International Association of Universities and 
Chair of the EfD Board, in which she pointed out the practices that need to 
be undertaken to achieve the objectives that EfD has set for itself. In this 
context, she discussed the challenges that we face and that the network has 
already achieved positive results. She focused, particularly, on the role that 
higher education has to play, and how the EfD network, academics, and 
international organizations must engage with each other and universities to 
address those objectives. This was followed by EfD Director Gunnar 
Köhlin discussing the scope of the EfD against the background of the 
ongoing pandemic and what lies ahead in terms of the EfD’s objectives. 

This year, Zhaoyang Liu was adjudged the winner of Peter Berck’s Best 
Discussion Paper Award for his paper on valuing a water purification 
scheme of forests. Gunnar Köhlin’s Best MSc Dissertation Award was 
conferred upon Camilo De Los Rios Rueda for his work on overlapping 
institutions and deforestation in the Columbian Amazon.  



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [160] 

For the first time at an EfD conference, Rebecca Klege discussed the status 
of gender equity within the network. She pointed out that despite 
significant improvements, the progress of gender equity within economics 
departments has somewhat stalled since 2009. Studies have shown that 
relative to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) subjects, 
female participation is quite low in economics. Moreover, since most EfD 
member institutions are housed within economics departments, the status 
of gender equity in the network is far from ideal. Except for centres in 
Kenya and India, there are huge gender disparities in EfD member 
institutions. Given this background, Klege discussed the short- and long-
term goals of the EfD to address this issue and announced the upcoming 
gender equity report.  

This year’s annual meeting brought together a large number of researchers 
from various countries to discuss a host of issues within the ambit of 
sustainable development. Despite the virtual nature of the conference, there 
was a high level of academic and social interaction and effective building of 
networks. In conclusion, the annual meeting facilitated wide-ranging 
academic discussion and collaboration within the EfD community and 
provided a much-needed platform for the discussion of pressing 
environmental concerns. 


