Simone Borghesi is Director of the Florence School of Regulation – Climate, part-time professor at the EUI, and Vice-Rector for International Relations at the University of Siena.
He is a member of the WCEREA – World Council of Environmental and Resource Economists Associations, and Secretary General of the Policy Outreach Committee of EAERE – the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
He is also a member of the CRM Academic Advisory Council of Brookings Institution (Washington D.C.), the Economics Advisory Council of the Environmental Defense Fund (New York), CEPR – Research and Policy Network on Climate Change, and External Faculty member of the
Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT (Cambridge, MA).
He was President of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2018-19) and of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2024-25).
He received an M.Sc. in Economics from University College London and a Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Institute. He worked at the International Monetary Fund, at the Fondazione ENI Enrico Mattei, and as Assistant Professor at the University of Pescara. He has been a visiting scholar at INRA – Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique, at the Department of Land Economy of the University of Cambridge, and the Centre of Economic Research of ETH.
In 2012 he was invited to the United Nations at the High-Level Meeting on “Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining A New Economic Paradigm”. In 2026, he received the EAERE Fellows Award. Since 2021, he has been participating as an invited speaker in all editions of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP).
He has been invited/keynote speaker at plenary sessions of international conferences, at leading global institutions (e.g. European Commission, EIB, OECD, RFF, the World Bank) and at leading universities in 20 different countries.
He currently directs the LIFE project NETS (Net-Zero Emissions Trading Systems, 2026-28). In the past, he directed the LIFE projects SIDE (Supporting the Implementation and Development of the EU ETS, 2017-18), DICET (Deepening International Cooperation on Emission Trading, 2019-22) and COASE (Collaborative Observatory for the Assessment of the EU ETS, 2023-25) and the EUI unit in the Horizon projects INNOPATH, CAPABLE and SPES. He was among the leading authors of the report “Pathways to deep decarbonization in Italy” (SDSN United Nations and IDDRI, Paris, 2015).
He has published three books and over 100 articles in edited volumes and peer-reviewed international journals, including Ecological Economics, Energy Economics, Energy Policy, Environmental and Resource Economics, European Economic Review, Journal of Economic Surveys, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Research Policy, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Science.
His work deals mainly with emissions trading, climate change, European climate policies, economic growth and environmental degradation, globalisation and sustainability of development.
He contributes to public debate on climate policy and sustainability through media appearances, public talks, and policy-oriented discussions. His work is frequently featured in international and Italian media outlets.
His full profile can be found
here.
