Edgar Hertwich

Edgar Hertwich researches life-cycle assessment, sustainable production and consumption, trade and environment, plus risk analysis. He explores how activities in society produce environmental pressures, and investigates alternative courses of action to reduce those pressures. He is Professor of Industrial Ecology at Yale University. From 2003 to 2015, he served as director of the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Professor Hertwich is a member of the International Resource Panel (IRP) and was the lead author of the IRP’s 2009 Panel report, The Environmental Impacts of Production and Consumption: Priority Products and Materials, and its 2015 report, Green Energy Choices, which assesses the environmental and resource impacts of different electricity generation technologies. 

Professor Hertwich seeks to understand the socioeconomic metabolism, which describes the extraction or harvesting of resources, their transformation to useful products, their utilization for desired services and the return of material resources to nature as emissions or waste. He is a pioneer in analyzing the global picture of emissions and resource utilization through the use of multiregional input-output models, which describe the entire world economy at an intermediate level of detail. This work has demonstrated the tight relationship between CO2 emissions, biomass use and affluence.

He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Industrial Ecology and Environmental Science & Technology. He has co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, many which have appeared in leading journals. Hertwich earned a PhD in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA.

Access Edgar Hertwich's university profile page here.