Consultant, Environmental Science and Policy

About me: I am an independent consultant and roaming geographer with over 20 years of experience providing reviews, analysis and synthesis of information needed to support a learning approach to policy decisions related to complex environmental and natural resource management problems. My primary focus has been on building a bridge between theory and practice in the development of payment and other institutional arrangements necessary to create incentives to protect watershed and other ecosystem services that are vital for human well-being and security. This involves the integration of information about relationships between land and water, issues of governance and participation in the management of common property resources, poverty alleviation, economic valuation based on the recognition of multiple interests and decision criteria, and about the general context - of high uncertainty and rapid global change.

These are among the topics addressed in Flows, a monthly news bulletin on lessons being learned from the implementation of payments for watershed services, which is now part of the International Institute for Environment and Development project on Developing Markets for Watershed Protection Services and Improved Livelihoods with initial support from the World Bank, through the Bank-Netherlands Watershed Partnership Program. These and other topics are also covered in numerous reports and publications which include entries in the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change and in the Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences.

Other not un-related topics are addressed in The Post-Normal Times, an environmental science and policy blog, which I developed to provide a space for all of the news that doesn't fit into formal reports or discrete categories. Actually, or at least for now, this is mostly running commentary on current events, with input from a selected group of colleagues who have influenced my work and who can be found listed on the PNT Advisory Board.

Other recent activities include serving as a lead author for the freshwater chapter, of the Policy Responses report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Subsequently I served as co-author for a case study conducted by Island Press and the Sonoran Institute that applies the MA approach to the development of scenarios that explore the consequences of water policy choices in the Lower Colorado river basin for its Delta and for human well-being. Other clients for whom I have prepared reports and policy briefs have included: The World Bank Environment Department, The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the US World Wildlife Fund, the UK World Wide Fund for Nature, Forest Trends, The Nature Conservancy, the Biodiversity Support Program (a former WWF-US, WRI and TNC consortium) and the Centro Internacional de Agriculture Tropical (CIAT). I have also undertaken brief assignments for the World Resources Institute, the UNDP Global Environment Facility and the National Academy of Public Administration. Prior to becoming a consultant, I served as staff for several interdisciplinary scientific committees of the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, and for a project of the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. As a graduate student, I also had the opportunity to serve as the project officer for a project of SCOPE (the Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment of the International Council of Scientific Unions) on ecological economics and integrated assessment, and to conduct a review of poverty and environment issues for the UN Environment Program.

I also have developed and managed projects, and organized scientific meetings, workshops and other special events. Oh, and I am working on a book proposal...

Languages: fluent in English and Italian, working knowledge of Spanish, and fair ability to read Portuguese.

Educational background: in both the natural and social environmental sciences with a special interest in socioeconomic and institutional aspects of natural resource management and implications of complexity for decision-making. M.A. in Geography, University of Maryland (2000), graduate work in the Marine, Estuarine Environmental Studies program, B.A. environmental studies (George Washington University 1982).

Other: 2 continuing education paralegal courses, participation in a training workshop on facilitation of "Future Search" conferences, and ongoing study and practice of the art of aikido, in which I recently achieved the rank of shodan (i.e., 1st degree black belt).

For more information, you may contact me at:

visitors"at"sylviatognetti.org

(please replace "at" with @ - this is an anti-spam measure).

 

Updated: March 31, 2006