Roel Boumans

Visiting Research Fellow
rboumans@afordablefutures.com
802-425-4872

Education

BA, Universiteit van Amsterdam; MA, Universiteit van Amsterdam; PhD, Louisiana State University

Biography

Roel Boumans, ecological economist is the sole proprietor of Accounting FOR Desirable Futures LLC (AFORDable Futures). He, together with his wife Catharina Sikkes, operates Windycorners, a homestead farm in Charlotte, Vermont.

Since 1996 his work has been highly integrated on the interface between the human and natural systems. He designed the Multi-scale Integrated Model of Ecosystem Services (MIMES), an integrated suite of models to address the system dynamics of four aspects of capital; natural, human, built, and social. All relevant in accounting for ecosystem services: the ecosystems that support the production of food, the knowledge embedded in the culture to make use of what the ecosystems provide, the capital investments appropriate within the knowledge systems, and the social arrangements and networks to ensure equal distribution of what is produced. Through MIMES projects, he is simulating the tradeoffs inherent in the simultaneous production of and demands upon multiple ecosystem goods and services and explores changes in ecosystem and market economics simultaneously across spatial and temporal scales. MIMES is now featured by the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit.

Boumans is Special Government Employee (SGE) at the EPA, hired specifically to advance their agenda for innovative, integrated multi-disciplinary research. He was able to demonstrate and implement MIMES at multiple EPA labs. This work resulted in a demonstration of MIMES for the Albemarle Pamlico Watershed, and the HYGEIA model (recently in Urban Climate), HYGEA is a broadly applicable modeling and support platform for decisions at the local scale with consideration of potential climate change related health effects and the effectiveness of different mitigation options.

He also serves as Senior Scientist for Earth Economics, a non-profit organization located in Tacoma, Washington. Together with Earth Economics he worked on simulation models with the Tulalip tribe within the Snohomish Watershed to explore the consequences of land management decisions to tribal values. Additional involvements are with the Henri Tudor Institute in Luxembourg, for exploration of applying Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) within Ecosystem Based Models, and with the institute for the energy and the environment at the University of Sao Paulo concerning environmental impacts.