Michael Dorsey

I am an assistant professor in Dartmouth College’s Environmental Studies Program and I direct the College’s Climate Justice Research Project (funded in part by the Ford Foundation). Since 2008 I've served as an Affiliated Researcher on the Sustainability and Climate Research Team at Erasmus University’s Research Institute of Management inside the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM-ERIM). Over the past year I've also been a visiting scholar attached to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Climate Change Initiative. I was a co-contributor to the re-released, new edition volume, of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society: Negative Returns On South African Investments (Rozenberg Press, The Netherlands & University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, South Africa, 2008).

For more than a decade I've variously been asked to provide strategic guidance and advice to governments, foundations, firms and a multitude of others on the interplay of multilateral environment policy, finance and economic development matters. In 1992, I was a member of the U.S. State Department Delegation to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, “The Earth Summit.” From 1994-96 I was a task force member of President William Jefferson Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. As a member of the Sierra Club since the mid-1980s, I served six years (from 1997-2003) as a Director on the Club’s national board; and am currently a sitting Director (thru May 2010). I led the Sierra Club's delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa. From 1999 to 2001, I lived in Ecuador where I was the program director for biodiversity based jointly with the Instituto de Estudios Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo and Acción Ecológica. While at Acción Ecológica I co-led an initiative to monitor the commercialization of biodiversity in Ecuador as well as the other four countries in the Andean Pact. For the past several years I have advised the Ecuadorian Institute for Intellectual Property (IEPI)—an Ecuadorian government agency—on a variety of biodiversity, IPR and inter-related concerns. I've actively participated in various capacities as a researcher, advocate and otherwise at UNFCCC COPs since COP10; CBD COPs since COP5; inter alia. From April 2007 until November 2008 I was a member of Senator Barack Obama’s energy and environment Presidential campaign team.

I graduated from the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment (B.S. & Ph.D.), Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (M.F.S.) and The Johns Hopkins University (M.A.). Before joining Dartmouth’s faculty, I held the college’s Thurgood Marshall Fellowship in Environmental Studies and Geography. Prior to my Dartmouth post I've held visiting positions at other institutions, including: in the Department of Regional Planning at the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) in 2002; and in the Graduate School of Public and Development Management, at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) in 2002.

In 2007 I helped co-founding Islands First—a capacity building organization for small island developing states facing disproportionate threats from unfolding climate chaos. I am presently a board member. Since 2007 I have been actively involved in the planning process for the forthcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), i.e., Rio+20.