Dan Stein is the Chief Economist at IDinsight.
As Chief Economist, Dan is responsible for setting and maintaining technical standards throughout the organization, developing new projects and partnerships, and helping manage a team of technical experts. Dan is especially passionate about agricultural technology adoption, rural development, nutrition, and climate change mitigation.
Prior to IDinsight, Dan was an Economist at the World Bank, where he specialized in agriculture and forestry impact evaluations. Dan holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, where he researched agricultural micro-insurance.
IDinsight’s mission is to use data and evidence to help leaders combat poverty worldwide. Their new website is: https://www.givinggreen.earth/
Q & A with Dan:
How does Giving Green fit into IDinsight?
IDinsight is a non-profit organization that works in the international development space to help funders, governments, and implementors make better decisions. We create research to try and figure what is working in international development and how to make it better. Giving Green is incubated with IDinsight – essentially the idea is that we are thinking about the environment, specifically climate change.
For a long time I wanted to find a guide to fight climate change and give some money towards it but I could never find specific information on it, which is what kind of inspired me to fund Giving Green.
Who makes up Giving Green?
Mostly IDinsight- I lead and started it- Nicolas parker, another associate researchers – we are kind of a friendly group of like-minded organizations thinking about these things together.
How are you funded?
If anyone is interested in a partnership – we are open. People can donate to Giving Green which will be funneled through ID.
Who uses carbon offsets?
First we look at the space- there’s a lot of people that do stuff that affect carbon emission right now and can, in theory, be verified… This idea was created as a market for these type of short term offsets. The types of customers are either people in so-called “compliance markets”, they have very specific rules and regulations. We also have the voluntary market, people create offsets and third parties certify these offsets and either individuals or businesses can purchase these, essentially to remove their guilt, or in businesses to do corporate social responsibility. About 97% of offsets are actually purchased by businesess.
Some new areas coming up that we are really excited to work on are looking at things like social movements- for example the Sunrise movement, which is young people out protesting- we want to know if that is effective… As well as such things as lobbying.
We’re diving deep into some of these and trying to come up with recommendations.
Giving Green offers short term and long term recommendations. The long term include clean energy research and lobbying national policy and the short term are verifiable decreases in GHG emissions or increase carbon capture.
Short-term recommendations seek to cause immediate, verifiable decreases in GHG emissions (or increase carbon capture).
Long-term recommendations seek to make bigger, riskier bets with the hope of changing the long-term arc of climate change. These include avenues such as funding clean energy research, or lobbying national policy.
Giving green is trying to look at these markets and provide people with which they feel most comfortable working with and that make the biggest impact.
Where can you contact Dan Stein?
Email: daniel.stein@idinsight.org
Their website is: https://www.givinggreen.earth/
