Joshua Goldstein, PhD

Joshua Goldstein earned his IPER PhD in June 2007. His dissertation, "Paying for Conservation in Human-dominated Landscapes," contributed to the emerging field of conservation finance and helped to identify innovative financial incentives and policy mechanisms to make conservation economically attractive and commonplace. The next step for Josh is a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Economics and Conservation Finance with the Natural Capital Project. The Natural Capital Project, a joint venture between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund, aspires to assess the economic values of nature's services and incorporate those values into resource decisions.

For his dissertation research, Josh worked with private landowners in Hawaii to identify financially viable business strategies for aligning conservation and economic values in land management. The focal point was sustainable forestry based upon the native, high-value hardwood, Acacia koa, because of its potential for a “win-win” outcome – private profitability for the landowner while enhancing habitat to support biodiversity, including many endangered species, and supply ecosystem services. The major focus of this work was the identification of strategies for overcoming three key financial barriers for landowners considering koa forestry: high upfront costs, long time horizon until timber harvest, and high investment risk due to biophysical, economic, and institutional uncertainty. Josh collaborated with an interdisciplinary project team, and his research contributed to our understanding of how conservation groups can work in partnership with private landowners to develop projects that are attractive and beneficial to all participants.

Prior to starting in IPER, Josh graduated magna cum laude from Williams College in 2000 with a Bachelor of Arts with highest honors in biology, and he was also nominated to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. His senior honors thesis examined the short- and long-term factors driving variability in primary productivity in the Mystic River Estuary, CT. For the two years between college and graduate school, Josh worked at The Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA as a research assistant on the Plum Island Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research project. project.

Josh received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2004, which supported his graduate education at Stanford.