Vanessa is our new Global Economics Center director. In this position, Vanessa will manage a growing and diverse team of Economists, developing strategies to ensure that innovative and high-quality economic analysis is used to spearhead and support strategic projects across WRI, and implementing approaches to strengthen WRI’s capacity to design and deploy innovative economic approaches to advance structural solutions to today’s most acute environmental challenges.

Vanessa is an environmental economist with more than 25 years of experience working on the design and up-take of solutions on the intersect of environment, social development, and equity. Vanessa has worked in government, academia, and civil society. In her early career, Vanessa served as Deputy Policy Director for the Mexican Ministry of Environment where she worked on the design of economic instruments for biodiversity conservation as well as in the design of equitable low carbon development pathways. She was also Head of Environment at the Mexican Centre for Equitable Development (EQUIDE) where she spearheaded Mexico´s research on environmental poverty and the policy efforts to recognize climate resilience as a social right. Since 2003, Vanessa worked for World Wildlife Fund (WWF) where she held senior management positions in Mexico and internationally for the global network, the last one as Deputy Lead for the Global Climate and Energy Practice.

Vanessa holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, a master’s degree in Development Policy and a PhD in the Political Economy of the Environment, both from the University of York in the United Kingdom.