Joan Martínez Alier receives the Balzan Prize in Rome

Economist Joan Martínez Alier from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) has received the Balzan Prize in Rome on Thursday 18 November, from the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella. The award ceremony, which corresponds to the 2020 edition, postponed due to the Covid19 pandemic, has taken place at 11 am at the Accademia dei Liccei.

Martínez Alier has been awarded in the category of “Environmental Challenges: Responses from the Social Sciences and Humanities”, conferred onto him by the Balzan International Foundation in Milan. The award includes a cash prize of €695,000. The Balzan International Foundation highlights the “exceptional quality of his contributions to the foundation of ecological economics”. His pioneering work on the relation between the environment and the economy has made visible the unequal distribution of natural resources, and the need for environmental justice. He defends an ecological economy to tackle an economic model, which is favouring climate change and destroying our biodiversity.

Born in Barcelona in 1939, Martinez Alier is Emeritus Professor of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona since 2010. His main line of research revolves around the relation between ecology and economics, which has allowed him to research into agrarian history, environmental policies, and resource-based social conflicts. He is the current director of the journal Ecología Política, and among his best-known publications are Ecology and Economics (1984), Ecological Economics and Environmental Politics (2001), and Environmentalism of the Poor (2005).

Since 1961, the Balzan International Foundation has awarded the Balzan Prize to scientists whose contributions are evaluated by an international committee made up of 19 leading figures from different fields.

The Balzan Prize has been awarded, among others, to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and the current Spanish Minister of Universities, Manuel Castells. In addition to Joan Martínez Alier, this year’s prize-winners are physicist Susan Trumbore of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany; Jean-Marie Tarascon, lecturer of the Collège de France specialising in electrochemical energy, and the Brazilian jurist Antonio Augusto Cançado Trindade.