Program Interactive Program

Dave Poulton was appointed as the Director of the Alberta Land Institute effective June 1, 2016. Dave is an experienced executive and consultant, leading his own consulting practice. He is also the Executive Director of the Alberta Association for Conservation Offsets (AACO), a forum to build shared understanding respecting the use of conservation offsets and the development of offset policy.

Dr. Eran Kaplinsky is the Alberta Land Institute Research Director and an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alberta. His research and teaching interests include land-use planning and regulation, property law, law and economics, and municipal law. He holds a Bachelor of Laws from Tel Aviv University, a Master of Laws from the University of Toronto, and a Doctor of Juridical Science from the University of Toronto.

Martine Maron is a Professor of Environmental Management at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research is in environmental policy and conservation ecology. She is a Deputy Director of the NESP Threatened Species Recovery Hub and leads its Policy research theme, which includes projects seeking to improve biodiversity offsetting for threatened species and ecological communities. She helped draft the IUCN Biodiversity Offsets Policy and the UNCCD’s Land Degradation Neutrality approach, and has contributed to the development of numerous policy tools including Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act Offsets Assessment Guide, the Reef Trust offsets calculator, and New Zealand’s biodiversity offsets accounting model. She continues to work with governments around Australia and the world to improve offset policy and practice, and leads an international working group which is developing a new approach to aligning ecological compensation with conservation targets.

Fabien Quétier is currently the technical director on ‘No Net Loss’ and ‘Net Gain’ solutions for biodiversity at BIOTOPE, a consulting firm based in France. He advises clients, private and public decision makers, on the implementation of the mitigation hierarchy to projects and programs, by designing and leading the preparation of biodiversity baselines and assessments (including Critical Habitat and High Conservation Value assessments), action plans, and mitigation and offset management plans. This requires dealing with the technical, economic, legal and institutional challenges of on-the-ground assessment, management and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as complex conservation – development trade-offs.

He has worked extensively in Europe and across the tropics (South America, Central and West Africa, Madagascar, New Caledonia, etc.) in various sectors (infrastructure, energy, mining, oil & gas, commercial forestry, agribusiness and other commodities). He is a recognized practitioner of international best practice in this field, including performance standards and safeguards of financial institutions, and the Standard on biodiversity offsets published by the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Program (BBOP). He is regularly involved in advising lenders, corporations, NGOs and governments on their biodiversity policies, and is an active member of the community of practice around IFC’s Performance Standard 6, for which he also. Fabien is a member of the IUCN commission on ecosystem management and remains at the cutting edge of biodiversity and ecosystem services science through regular publications and collaborations with researchers and other peers.

Dr. Weber is principal of Mweber Research where she conducts environmental policy research. For the past 17 years, Dr. Weber was a senior researcher with Alberta Research Council, Alberta Innovates, and InnoTech Alberta. In 2019 she became Chief Environmental Economist for BC Ministry of Environment.

In her consulting role she works with industry, academic, and government partners in the municipal and resource sectors to develop market based opportunities for managing ecosystem services including water quality, natural infrastructure, and biodiversity. She is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta.

Joe Bull is a quantitative conservation scientist, with an academic background in Ecology and Physics. Having spent a number of years as a private-sector environmental consultant focusing on Ecology and Climate Change, he undertook a PhD at Imperial College London, followed by a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) in the University of Kent, and remains a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford.

In 2012, Joe co-founded a specialist ecological consultancy (Wild Business Ltd), which he continues to direct. The consultancy puts conservation research into practice, particularly around the themes of ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity, biodiversity offsetting, and rewilding policies – and has now worked for a range of clients on projects across four continents.

Joe is primarily interested in natural resource management within dynamic socio-ecological systems, particularly in relation to economic development activities. His research currently focuses on biodiversity offsetting and the implementation of ‘no net loss’ policies, which he has explored all over the world (most extensively in Central Asia, Australia, and Europe). He has also studied the management and conservation of wildlife populations, including saiga antelope in Uzbekistan and wolves in Scandinavia.

Stewart Elgie is a professor of law and economics at the University of Ottawa, and director of the University’s interdisciplinary Environment Institute. He received his Masters of Law from Harvard, and his doctorate (J.S.D.) from Yale. He is also the founder and chair of Smart Prosperity Institute (formerly Sustainable Prosperity), Canada’s premiere green economy think tank and policy-research network. His research involves environmental and economic sustainability, with a particular focus in recent years on market-based approaches.

Elgie started his career as an environmental lawyer in Alaska, litigating over the Valdez oil spill. He returned to Canada and founded Ecojustice, now Canada’s largest non-profit environmental law organization; he was counsel on many precedent setting cases, including four wins in Supreme Court of Canada on constitution and environment issues. He was later hired by Pew Trusts as founding executive director of the multi-stakeholder Canadian Boreal Initiative. Prior to his faculty position at University of Ottawa (2004), Elgie held appointments at several Canadian universities (U.B.C., Alberta, York). He has served on or chaired many advisory bodies in the environment/sustainability area. In 2001, Elgie was awarded the Law Society of Upper Canada medal for exceptional lifetime contributions to law – the youngest man ever to receive the profession’s highest honour.