Assessing Natural Resource Damages

Richard W. Dunford grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis. He graduated in 1971 from the University of Missouri in Columbia, initially majoring in Mathematics but later switching to Economics. He enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1971. After three semesters Rick decided to take a break from graduate school, becoming a full-time Project Specialist in the Agricultural Economics Department. His first project was to collaborate with a team of three professors and three Research Assistants on a six-month, in-depth review of natural resource policy issues in Wisconsin for the State Legislature. After the successful completion of that project, Rick continued working full-time for another year on other research projects in the Agricultural Economics Department. At that point he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Agricultural Economics Department, majoring in environmental and natural resource economics. In 1975 Rick was awarded an M.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Agricultural Economics. He completed his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics in 1977.

Rick accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Agricultural Economics Department at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman in 1977. After getting tenure at WSU, he was a Consultant in Residence in the Environment and Natural Resource Policy Division of the Congressional Research Service in Washington, DC, during the 1983 - 1984 school year. In 1986 he accepted a Senior Economist position in the Center for Economics Research at the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in Research Triangle Park, NC. Dr. Bill Desvousges, Dr. Reed Johnson, and Rick co-founded Triangle Economic Research (TER) in Durham, North Carolina, in 1994, which specialized in natural resource damage (NRD) assessment. Blasland, Bouck & Lee (BBL), an engineering and science consultancy, acquired TER in 2001. In 2005 Rick formed Environmental Economics Services (EES) in Raleigh, North Carolina, a sole proprietorship that specializes in NRD assessment. He recently retired from EES.

Rick has been a member of several professional associations for decades, including the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the International Society for Ecological Economics, and the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis. He has published widely in professional journals, and he has presented technical papers at many professional meetings. He has written more than two dozen expert reports, has given deposition testimony on many of those reports, and has provided trial testimony in three NRD cases.