Dr Thomas McDermott

I am the Galway University Foundation Lecturer in the Economics of Climate Change and Development at NUI Galway. I am also Director of the MSc in Global Environmental Economics at NUI Galway, a Visiting Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, and a former IRC Government of Ireland Research Fellow.

My research interests are at the intersection of environmental and development economics. I have published widely, including in leading economics journals, as well as more generalist science and social science journals. My research has been cited over 1200 times, including in the recent high profile IPCC SR1.5 report (in Chapters 4 and 5). I am also co-editor with Sam Fankhauser of The Economics of Climate Resilient Development (Edward Elgar, 2016). 

I have previously consulted for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, the Irish EPA and Ireland's Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, including contributing a background paper for Ireland’s first statutory National Climate Change Adaptation Framework (published in January 2018).

I was previously Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency on the economic impacts of flooding in Ireland, and options for managing flood risk, including an emphasis on the role of insurance. The outputs from this project include publications at JEEP, Phil Trans R Soc A, as well as a policy paper on flooding and insurance, and a policy brief on local adaptation decision-making. 

I hold a PhD from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), where I was supervised by Frank Barry and Richard Tol. During the Summer of 2012 I was a PhD research intern at the United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki. I hold a B.Comm (International – with Italian) and an M.Sc. in Economics from the National University of Ireland, Galway and previously taught economics at Dublin City University and at UCC.