About AERE
In 1979, AERE held its first official annual meeting with the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) in Atlanta, Georgia. During the AERE business meeting, those attending were polled to elect both officers and a board of directors. This began two traditions that continue today. The first is that the AERE winter meetings are held jointly with the ASSA. These meetings feature a number of AERE sessions, including one joint AERE/ASSA session and the AERE Luncheon which is the highlight of the annual meetings and precedes the business meeting. The second tradition is that the working heart of AERE is at Resources for the Future, including the office of the Executive Director.
The two most important actions of that first year were the initial membership drive and the initiation of discussions with Academic Press, Inc. about making the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), first published in 1974, the official journal of the association. The first issue of JEEM that included the imprint of AERE, including a list of officers, was volume 10, number 3, of September 1983. The early membership drive resulted in AERE having almost 600 members within two years of its inaugural meeting.
AERE began publishing the AERE Newsletter in 1981. Then, as now, the AERE Newsletter is published bi-annually and includes policy essays, meeting announcements, calls for papers, new publications, research reports, and position announcements. More recently, in spring 2007, AERE launched a new journal, the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP). REEP aims to fill the gap between traditional academic journals and the general interest press by providing a widely accessible yet scholarly source for the latest thinking on environmental economics and related policy. The Review publishes a range of material including symposia, articles, and regular features.
To facilitate interactions among resource and environmental economists, AERE began the AERE Summer Workshop in 1985. The first workshop was held in Boulder, Colorado with 53 participants and was funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The AERE Workshop focuses on a particular topic and aims to maintain an intimate atmosphere in which all workshop participants are in the same room (no parallel sessions) to enhance opportunities to meet and interact with others working on very similar research topics. As such, recent workshops continue to have 60 to 70 participants and have been held in places such Jackson Hole, Lake Tahoe, and Bar Harbor. Topics have ranged from market-based instruments for environmental protection to assessing and managing environmental and public health risks. Sponsors of the workshop are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Economic Research Service (US Department of Agriculture), and the Fish and Wildlife Service (US Department of the Interior).
Since its inception, AERE has had an informal association with the American Economics Association and the American Agricultural Economics Association (now the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association). With the inauguration of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in 1992, AERE expanded its affiliations to include this organization, and more recently has sponsored paper sessions at the annual meetings of organizations such as the Southern Economics Association and the Western Economic Association International.
In 1998, AERE co-sponsored with EAERE the first World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists in Venice, Italy. The World Congress is held every four years, and has taken place in Monterey, California and Kyoto, Japan. The 4th World Congress is due to be held in 2010 in Montreal, Canada. New initiatives of AERE include the development of a Quadrennial All-AERE Conference. This conference is designed to span a range of topics, include parallel paper sessions, and will be held during the summer in even-numbered years in which there is not a World Congress. The combination of the AERE Workshop, the All-AERE Conference, and the World Congress – in conjunction with AERE-sponsored sessions at the ASSA and regional economic association annual meetings – offers AERE members the widest range of opportunities to present current research and to interact with professional economists from around the world.