Dr. Theodore Panayotou, 2007 NOBEL Peace Prize Contributor, is Professor of Economics and Ethics and Rector of the University of Limassol (UoL), Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University and Member of the Cyprus President’s Council of the National Economy. He taught Environment & Development Economics for 25 years at Harvard University where he served as Director of the Environment and Sustainable Development Program at the Centre for International Development.

Before joining Harvard, Dr. Panayotou was a senior economist with the Rockefeller Foundation (New York), based in Southeast Asia. He advised Presidents and Premiers in over 20 countries including China, Mexico, Russia, the USA and several countries in Eastern Europe, Central America and Southeast Asia, and served as consultant to companies, governments, the UN and the World Bank.

Dr. Panayotou has published more than a hundred journal articles, monographs and books on the subjects of economic development, environmental management, climate change, sustainability and competitiveness. His most recent book Environment for Growth is published by Harvard University Press.

In early 1990s, Dr. Panayotou was one of the first environmental economists to introduce and test the idea of an inverted-U relationship between environment degradation and economic development (known as Environmental Kuznets Curve) and explore the role of economic policies, and the capacity to absorb innovation and technological change.

In the early 2000s in cooperation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard (now at Columbia), Panayotou estimated econometrically and valued the economic impacts of climate change on different regions of the world and proposed a scheme of Compensation for Meaningful Participation in Climate Change Control.

In the years leading to the Kyoto Protocol, Dr. Panayotou contributed to the development of Joint Implementation, emissions trading and the Clean Development Mechanism, and trained hundreds of policy makers in governments and international organizations in the economics of climate change through his Climate Change Workshops at Harvard.