Francisco Alpízar is Professor and Chair of the Environmental and Natural Resource Economics Group at Wageningen University and Research. Before that, he was Research Director and Principal Investigator at CATIE, a multilateral research institute based in Costa Rica. In 2005, he founded and directed the Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program, which ran for 12 years and trained hundreds of Latin American environmental economists. In 2007 he contributed to the creation of the Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative, and was EfD Center Director for Central America for 8 years. Francisco is still linked to the EfD Initiative in his role as Scientific Program Lead in charge of the Coastal and Marine Resources (CmaR) Collaborative Program.
Alpizar’s work has explored incentive-based approaches to improve the private and public management of natural resources, with a particular focus on climate change, biodiversity and developing countries. He is particularly interested in how firms and individuals react to policies and institutions, in different contexts and given formal/informal norms and values. He has undertaken studies using behavioral, experimental and nonmarket valuation methods.
His work appears in a number of journals including: PNAS, Nature Sustainability, Nature Climate Change, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Environmental and Resource Economics, Ecological Economics, and World Development. Alpizar is currently an international advisor to the Center for Collective Action Research, at University of Gothenburg, and is Associate Editor of Energy and Resource Economics, and Review of Environmental Economics and Policy.
Francisco has been a regular advisor to the Inter-American Development Bank, IUCN, The Nature Conservancy, UNDP, The World Bank, and the WWF, among others.