Gunārs Platais, Collaborator, United States

Dr. Gunārs Platais is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering (MCGE) at the University of Colorado Boulder. He also holds an affiliate faculty position with the Masters of the Environment (MENV) program and is a Sr. Fellow at the Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado (SILC).

Prior to joining the University of Colorado Boulder, Gunārs worked for 20 years at the World Bank where he focused on environmental and natural resource economics and environmental risk management. He was instrumental in introducing the concept of payment for environmental services (PES) and other innovative financial mechanisms into Bank operations to support conservation. He led multidisciplinary teams in large lending operations such as the US$50 million Ecomarkets PES project in Costa Rica and the $US40 million Reflorestar PES project in Brazil. Both PES projects are considered exemplary and the lessons learned have been applied in PES projects across the world. He led the national Green Accounting project in Guatemala and was instrumental in introducing the concept in Costa Rica and Honduras. Before joining the World Bank, he worked as Policy advisor to the Salvadoran government on the US$20 million USAID funded Green Project. Under his leadership the country, that had recently signed the peace accords, ending the long civil war, promulgated its first environmental law.

Throughout his career he has undertaken analytical work and specialized in the integration of natural resource management and conservation in policy and decision-making processes. He has worked extensively throughout Latin America and provided cross-support to Bank teams in Asia, Africa and Europe. As a fully accredited environmental risk management specialist he worked on the application of environmental safeguards throughout multiple sectors (health, energy, water, transport, infrastructure).

Gunārs has a BSc in Forest Engineering from his native Brazil, a MSc from Colorado State University and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in Wildland Resource Science where he focused on Natural Resource Economics and Policy.