Suzi Kerr appointed to Interim Climate Change Commission

Apr 17, 2018

Motu Senior Fellow, Dr Suzi Kerr has been appointed to the Interim Climate Change Committee. The Committee's goal is getting New Zealand down to net-zero emissions by 2050, with 100 per cent renewable electricity generation by 2035. 

The interim group will be replaced by an independent Climate Change Commission in May of 2019. 

Dr Kerr is currently a Senior Fellow at Motu, a Principal Investigator in Te Pūnaha Matatini, a centre of research excellence focused on networks and complex systems, and an Adjunct Professor at Victoria University. She graduated from Harvard University in 1995 with a PhD in Economics. From 1998 to 2009 she was the founding Director of Motu. In 2010 she won the NZIER Economics Award. She has also worked at the University of Maryland at College Park, Resources for the Future (USA), the Joint Center for the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT, and was a Visiting Professor at Stanford University for the 2009/10 year and at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in the first half of 2014. She is a member of the Air New Zealand Sustainability Panel and, in 2018, is President of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.

Her current research work focuses on climate change. She empirically and theoretically investigates domestic and international climate change policy with special emphasis on emissions pricing and land use in both the tropics and New Zealand. She has led and co-led several large international projects including the writing of the World Bank and ICAP handbook on emissions trading ‘Emissions Trading in Practice’. She is the science leader for research on the impacts and implications of climate change within the Deep South National Science Challenge.

The chair of the committee is David Prentice (previously CEO of Opus International) and the deputy chair is Lisa Tumahai the Kaiwhakahaere of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. The other committee members alongside Dr Kerr are:

• Dr Harry Clark, a New Zealand expert on agricultural greenhouse gas research
• Dr Keith Turner, former CEO of Meridian and professional director
• Dr Jan Wright, former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment

Check out the media coverage of this news at Stuff, NZ Herald, ODT Rural Life, and RNZ.