Professor Kerry Turner,  CBE, BSc, MA, FRSA
Environmental Economist, Consultant & Academic
(ABGS 1960-1967)

 
Kerry Turner

Professor Kerry Turner

Professor Kerry Turner is a Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and was the Director of The Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, (CSERGE), from 1996 to 2010.

Kerry was brought up in Clifton Terrace, Aberaman, the son of Ben Rees Turner1 and Eunice Ann Turner, née Price. He attended Aberaman Junior School leaving there for Aberdare Boys Grammar School in 1960. At A level he studied A Levels in History, Geography, Economics and was taught by J.B. (Curly) Davies, Tom Evans and Caryl Edwards respectively. He played a number of sports at school, but tennis was his main activity, and he helped run the school tennis team. Kerry still enjoys the game and manages to get onto the tennis court to hit a few balls. In his final year at school he was Deputy Head Boy.

He entered University College Swansea in 1967 and graduated in 1970 with a BSc in Economics. Following this he gained a Cert..Ed. from Cardiff in 1971, followed by an M.A. from Leicester University in 1972. He has been awarded a DSc by the University of Hull, to be conferred in July 2014.

In his professional capacity from the mid-1970s, Kerry sought to develop and pioneer the interface between environmental/ecological economics and the natural sciences in the context of a range of environmental management situations.

This work began with a focus on waste management and was extended into pollution control, ecosystem conservation and management, and coastal/catchment management. Strategies for adapting to and mitigation of the effects of environmental change, including climate change, has also been a particular focus for his work. He helped to establish and has worked in two ESRC funded research centres as research fellow, executive director and director — The Public Sector Economics Research Centre, Leicester University and East Anglia 1976-1979, and then at CSERGE 1991-2007.

Kerry’s career has involved work in many related fields of economics and the environment, however in terms of location it has remained firmly rooted in the East of England. It can be summarised as follows:

Although Kerry has been continuously in post at UEA from 1977 to the present day, he has spent large amounts of time elsewhere at other universities or institutions across Europe:

He has also acted as a consultant to OECD, Paris, The World Bank, UNEP, UNESCO and FAO; and was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 1990s. He was also team leader and vice chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) international research programme during the 1990s.

Kerry has contributed several hundred articles to academic journals, books, and reports. He has also authored and co-authored a host of books2 in many areas allied to his interests mentioned above. He also sits on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals and was until 2012 Joint Chief Editor of Environmental and Resource Economics, (Springer).

Kerry was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1991, and in 1996 an honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute for Water and Environmental Management. In early 2000 he was awarded a CBE for his services to sustainable development.

Kerry married Merryl Noreen Eborne in 1971 at St Margaret’s Church, Aberaman. The couple have one son. Merryl was a contemporary of Kerry’s, at the Girls Grammar School in Plasdraw. Kerry’s brother Dr C.B. Turner (ABGS 1963-70), is Director of Registry, Governance and Students at Cardiff University; and Kerry’s cousin Jeremy Turner, (ABGS 1969-76) is the Artistic Director of Arad Goch, the young people’s theatre company based in Aberystwyth.

 

  1. Benjamin Rees Turner, Kerry’s father, attended the County School 1929-35. He took his School Certificate in 1935, and went on to attend University College Southampton. He became a teacher, and eventually Headteacher of Abertâf school.
    • Household Waste: separate collection recycling, 1983
    • Economics of Planning, 1977
    • Environmental Planning and Management, 1983
    • Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment, 1990 (translated into. Italian 1992, Spanish 1995)
    • Elementary Environmental Economics, 1994
    • Blueprint III, 1993
    • Edited: Sustainable Environmental Management: principles and practice, 1988, 2nd edn 1993
    • Edited jointly: Bibliography of Environmental Economics, vols 1 and 2, 1976
    • Progress in Resource Management and Environmental Planning, vol. 2, 1980, vol. 3, 1981, vol. 4, 1983
    • Wetlands: market and intervention failure, 1991
    • Economic Incentives and Environmental Policy, 1994
    • Ecosystems and Nature, 1999
    • Perspectives on Integrated Coastal Zone Management, 1999
    • Economics of Coastal and Water Resources, 2000
    • Managing a Sea: the ecological economics of the Baltic Sea, 2000
    • Managing Wetlands: an ecological economics approach, 2003
    • Managing European Coasts: past, present and future, 2005;
    • Valuing Ecosystem Services: the case of multifunctional wetlands, 2008.