AERE 2025 Summer Conference highlights research work of environmental and resource economists

Departmental News

Posted: June 17, 2025

The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) recently held its annual summer conference in New Mexico to showcase and discuss the latest research findings, contributing to the knowledge and advancement in environmental and resource economics. 

Held at Tamaya Resort in Bernalillo, the conference included more than 520 economists from around the world. The conference helps facilitate networking and collaboration opportunities, enabling researchers to connect with peers and mentors, forge collaborations, and build long-term relationships. 

AERE was founded in 1979 as a means for exchanging ideas, stimulating research, and promoting graduate training in environmental and resource economics, and is geared toward mentorship and professional development programs, particularly for graduate students and young scholars while helping to provide support for their career growth. AERE currently has over 1,000 members from more than 30 nations, coming from academic institutions, the public sector, and private industry.

The University of New Mexico Department of Economics played a key role in the planning of the conference and had a strong contingent of more than 25 with UNM connections participating. This group included research professors as well as current and former students who have gone on to positions at other universities and organizations, and several who have been connected to the department for more than 30 years including Professor Emerita Janie Chermak and Regent’s Professor Bob Berrens.

Environmental and resource economics has garnered more attention over the decades, but it didn’t start out that way. Originally, economists interested in environmental issues started out as agricultural, land, mineral and or forest economists. As environmental issues became bigger topics in the 1970s and 80s, the name of environmental economics emerged out of that.

The UNM Economics Department, although small in size, has played a significant role over the years with pioneers in the field who called UNM home. Their influence continues today in the faculty’s research, which tackles critical New Mexican, Southwest, and world challenges—water, wildfire, energy transitions, environmental health, and climate impacts— through cutting-edge, interdisciplinary methods.

“The thing that I would emphasize is the group that we have, because it's important to have critical mass. If you're one person exploring environmental and resource issues by yourself, it's hard to make headway. But if you can have five or six faculty members working on a related set of broader issues, then over time and as a community with that critical mass, that's how you make impact and how there's growth and those ideas and skill sets grow from the collaboration in the community and the group. And that happens both in place and across place."

– Regent's Professor Bob Berrens

Despite its size, UNM had a strong group at the conference. It was through UNM’s group and Chermak's efforts, along with support from UNM and the College of Arts and Sciences, to be able to secure the AERE 2025 Summer Conference here.

“You see the size of this national organization and there's also a world organization. I'm stunned at the size of the conference,” said Berrens. “If you would've attended one of these 30 years ago, there was only just at that time sort of a fledgling field in environmental and resource economics. However, the University of New Mexico already had a foothold. Despite being a relatively small program, it has been able to sustain that through time. It's not something I created, but just been a part of. I'm very proud to have been part of that.”

That's what has made the UNM Department of Economics fairly unique to create an environmental resource program in a small department says Berrens.

“My Ph.D. was in agriculture and resource economics. Janie's was in mineral economics. But I think both of us knew at grad school we would go and work on environmental resource issues. So, I was trained as an agricultural economist and she was trained as a mineral economist, and that was common for people 30 to 35 years ago.” Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Brookshire and Professor Emeritus H. Stuart Burness, both early environmental and resource economists themselves, played a role in hiring Berrens and Chermak in the early 1990s.

This year’s conference brought together experts from different sectors including academia, government, and the private sectors, to discuss policy implications and practical applications of environmental and resource economics, informing decision-making. It covered a broad range of topics, including energy, climate change, pollution, minerals, endangered species, water resources, natural resource management, and more, ensuring a comprehensive exploration of the field. 

Research presented ranged from Resilient Energy Economies, Understanding the Macroeconomic Implications of Large-Scale Climate Change Risk, Climate Change – Modeling, Environmental Health, Agriculture - Developing Countries, Urban Water Pricing and Climate Change – Policy to name a few. Urban Water Pricing featured research from UNM Ph.D. candidate Nahid Samimi titled Quantifying Heterogeneity in the Price Elasticities of Urban Water Demand: The Case of a Metropolitan Area in the US Southwest. Her mentor is UNM Associate Professor Jingjing Wang, who is also the Associate Director of UNM’s interdisciplinary graduate Water Resources Program.

Reflecting the breadth of topics, Assistant Professor Yuting Yang presented her research titled Optimal Solar Capacity Investment under Varying Net Metering Structures, while Assistant Professor Xiaoyang Wang presented his research titled When is Nickel Worth a Quarter:The Impact of the 2022 LME Nickel Short Squeeze.

Another UNM graduate student participant was Ahmed Amine Jawhari, who presented  Willingness-to-Pay for Less Wildfire Smoke? Unpacking Uncertainty, Consequentiality, and Prescribed Burning Acceptance in the Western US. Jawhari’s research discussed whether or not citizens were willing to accept less wildfire smoke from prescribed burns rather than much more smoke from a full blown wildfire. UNM Associate Professor and Regent’s Lecturer Benjamin Jones and Berrens are his mentors.

Along the lines of wildfire, a plenary session titled The Changing Risk and Burden of Wildfire, garnered significant interest on the opening day of the conference. It highlighted wildfire risk and how it is rapidly changing in the U.S. and many other countries. The session provided tools and insights from economics, in combination with data and models from the natural sciences, remote sensing, and machine learning. This combination is proving critical in understanding this changing risk and how we might respond.

“The thing that I would emphasize is the group that we have, because it's important to have critical mass. If you're one person exploring environmental and resource issues by yourself, it's hard to make headway,” said Berrens. “But if you can have five or six faculty members working on a related set of broader issues, then over time and as a community with that critical mass, that's how you make impact and how there's growth and those ideas and skill sets grow from the collaboration in the community and the group. And that happens both in place and across place.

"What we’re watching at the conference is that network come together and being hosted here at New Mexico, which is great, but the most important thing is to have that critical mass and community inside a department.”

For more information, visit UNM Department of Economics. For more information about the conference, visit AERE 2025 Summer Conference.

Top photo - Front row (l. to r.): UNM Ph.D. students Nahid Samimi, Pem Lama and Constanza Mier y Teran Ruesga, Assistant Professor Yuting Yang and Associate Professor Jingjing Wang. Middle Row (l. to r.): UNM Ph.D. students Ben Cornelius, Tosin Olofinsao and Ziqing Xie, Post-Doctoral Scholar University of Montana and UNM Ph.D. Ewa Vick, UNM Ph.D. student Sujaan Aryal, Assistant Professor New Mexico Tech, and UNM Ph.D. Suraj Ghimire, UNM Ph.D. students Jane Sawerengera and Stephania Alarcon Alcala, Regent’s Professor Robert Berrens and Assistant Professor Xiaoyang Wang. Back Row (l. to r.): Assistant Professor Old Dominion University, and UNM Ph.D. Rex Sitti, UNM Ph.D. student Ahmed Amine Jawhari, UNM Master’s students Alex Kaltenbach and Rhoan McMaster, Professor Emerita Janie Chermak and Associate Professor New Mexico State University, and UNM Ph.D. Jamal Mamkhezri. Missing: Assistant Professor Benjamin Jones, Sr. Program Manager and UNM Ph.D. Margo Gustina, UNM Ph.D. student Pufan Qi, Assistant Professor University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and UNM Ph.D. James Price and UNM undergrad student Nicholas Kennedy.

UNM Members of the AERE Summer Conference Organizing Committee included: J. Chermak, R. Berrens, B. Jones, J. Wang, X. Wang and Y. Yang

UNM Economics-connected folks who presented papers included: Y. Yang, X. Wang, A. Jawhari, E, Vick, N. Samimi, J. Mamkhezri and J. Price.