Robert C. Repetto, Ph.D.

Research

Robert Repetto is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. He is also a senior fellow for the energy and climate programs at the United Nations Foundation in Washington. Repetto used his Pew fellowship to develop a collaboration with the Marine Policy Center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to integrate environmental values into national income accounting frameworks. This effort produced multiyear accounts for fisheries, habitat, and recreational resources. The project demonstrated the feasibility of including marine resources in policies and provided guidance for incorporating these to the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the agency responsible for national income accounting. Repetto also wrote a report entitled “Quantifying the Financial Implications of Corporate Environmental Performance,” which was published in The Journal of Investing in 2002. During the course of his fellowship, Repetto shifted his emphasis to a comparative study of the U.S. and Canadian Atlantic sea scallop fisheries that had begun the previous summer. These two fisheries provide a rare natural experiment in the consequences of different approaches to fisheries management. Repetto carried out extensive interviews in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and other U.S. ports, along with parallel interviews in Nova Scotia—talking to fisheries scientists and managers, boat owners and captains, union officials and others. Repetto summarized the results of this research in a report entitled “The Atlantic Sea Scallop Industry in the U.S. and Canada: A Natural Experiment in Fisheries Management.” This report was the first in a series of policy discussion papers distributed by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and was published in Marine Policy and Issues in Science and Technology.

To learn more about Repetto, visit his bio online: https://www.iisd.org/about/people/robert-repetto.