National Environmental Accounting

Dr. Joy Hecht began working on environmental accounting as a research assistant to Dr. Henry Peskin at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC. A decade later, after pursuing a PhD in city and regional planning and launching a career working on environmental information issues in international development projects, she returned to economics. She found herself again working with Dr. Peskin on environmental accounting, this time in the Philippines and Indonesia. Environmental information and accounting became intertwined with environmental policy and economics, and she continued consulting in all these areas through the 1990s, working extensively in sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and southeast Asia.In 1996 Hecht joined IUCN/The World Conservation Union as coordinator of its Green Accounting Initiative. Work with IUCN provided an opportunity to contribute to the operational manual on environmental accounting published by the United Nations in 2000 and to participate in some of the London Group work on the 2003 SEEA. Those experiences convinced her of the need for a book on environmental accounting for a nontechnical audience.Hecht maintains an interest in policy in both U.S. and international contexts. In 2002, she took a position as the founding executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute, a nonprofit organization engaged in applied research and policy analysis to encourage sustainable strategies within the state. As this book went to press in 2004, she was working on environmental statistics and accounting in Egypt.When Joy Hecht is not overseas, she is exploring the United States; more on that may be found at http://users.rcn.com/jhecht/gypsy Other writings related to environmental issues may be found at http://users.rcn.com/jhecht/professional.