Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist and political ecologist working on environmental justice and limits to growth. He has a Bachelors degree in chemistry and a Masters in environmental engineering from Imperial College, a PhD in environmental policy from the University of the Aegean, and a second Masters in economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He is an ICREA professor since 2010. Before coming to Barcelona, Giorgos was a Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources group at the University of California-Berkeley.

Research interests

My research is ‘un-disciplinary’. I have worked over the years on very diverse topics; from water policy in Europe or California, participatory science, and evolution in societies, to climate change, limits to growth and conflicts over resource use. What connects my various pieces of work is a quest to understand why and how societies misuse their environments, and why behavioural, institutional and technological changes that could make a difference are not taken up. I am most known for my recent publications on ‘degrowth’, the hypothesis that societies can live better with less. My degrowth research combines institutional, ecological economic and historical analysis to explain how the idea of economic growth came to be hegemonic, why it is limited, and what alternatives there are to growth-based development. My latest book ‘Limits: why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care’ was published by Stanford University Press in 2019.