Kenneth M. Chomitz

Ken Chomitz is a senior advisor in the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank Group, where he has led a series of three evaluations of the Bank Group’s climate change activities including a just-completed report on climate change adaptation. Previously he was a Lead Economist with the Bank’s Development Research Group.

Chomitz’s work has focused on global environmental issues. He is the author of At Loggerheads? Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction and Environment in the Tropical Forests, and a coauthor of the Bank’s World Development Report 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World. He was a pioneer in the application of econometric methods to analyzing spatial patterns of deforestation and has published articles on economic issues related to deforestation, biodiversity and climate change.

Chomitz holds a degree in mathematics from MIT and a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a National Research Council Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences; Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University; and Senior Advisor with the Development Studies Project, a policy research institute associated with the Indonesian National Development Planning Board.