Neil Byron
Associate Commissioner

Neil Byron

Associate Commissioner

Dr Neil Byron has been appointed as a part-time Associate Commissioner to assist with the Commission's inquiry into the regulatory and policy barriers to effective Climate Change Adaptation.

Neil is an environmental economist and policy analyst. He was the Commissioner responsible for environment, agriculture and natural resource management issues in the Productivity Commission from April 1998 to March 2010. Neil presided over ten public inquiries and directed the Commission's environmental economics program during that period.

Other appointments were:

• Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Canberra
• teaching resource and environmental economics and development economics at Australian National University (ANU)
• Chief Technical Adviser of an United Nations (UN) Project in Dhaka, Bangladesh
• founding Director of the graduate program in Environmental Management and Development at ANU
• Assistant Director General of the Centre for International Forestry Research, based in Indonesia.

Neil has a BSc (with first class Honours) in Forestry from the ANU, an MA (Economics) and PhD (Resource Economics) from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Neil is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, a Director of Earthwatch Australia and a Member of the Independent Science Panel for the Great Barrier Reef. Since January 2009, he has been an Adjunct Professor in Environmental Economics at the Crawford School of Economics and Government.