An Economic Literacy Project (ELP) for the Environmental Community:

Helping to Build a Smarter and Sustainable Economy

The Economic Literacy Project (ELP) centres on training and knowledge building that supports the development of a smarter and sustainable economy.

The training program consists of a series of six, ½ day training workshops this spring at the Centre for Social Innovation – Spadina in Toronto that will build ENGO capacity by increasing knowledge and understanding of economic concepts and their role in supporting a green economy. This combination of classroom training, information sharing and convening is designed to provide a pulse of capacity building to environmental leaders and affiliated partners and allies. The training stream takes a case-based approach to address key economic concepts, their assumptions, key measures and gaps, and their strengths and limitations.

Session #1 April 7 Assessing the Promise and Perils of Markets

- Anticipate when economic markets are more likely to work or fail the environment and how markets compare to other ways of managing human interactions.

Session #2 April 21 Valuing the Priced and Unpriced Environment

– How to value environmental gains and losses, using prices and non-price measures of value, so that people can be better informed about environmental and social scarcities.

Session #3 May 5 Rewarding Pro-Environmental Behaviour

– How economists understand humans, and how pro-environmental behaviour can be purposefully or perversely affected, as humans act in an environmental context.

Session #4 May 19 Reconciling Trade-Offs for Better Decisions

– Economic tools and strategies that can inform public decisions that involve contested gains and losses, over space and time, within and outside of the marketplace.

Session #5 June 2 Redefining Economic Progress and Sustainability

– What is included, and omitted, by old and new measures of the economy, and how different forms of natural and human-created wealth relate to each other and the measurement of sustainability.

Session #6 June 16 Reorienting the Economy for the 21st Century

– How ecological economic models can inform the pathways to desirable futures and strategies to manage risks and uncertainties and other unknowns.

All sessions take place on Tuesday afternoons from 1:00 – 4:30 at the Centre for Social Innovation – Spadina (CSI-Spadina) in Toronto.

The instructor of the program is Eric Miller, a consulting ecological economist and contract faculty at York University. He has experience serving the Ontario and Federal governments as a public servant and has helped hundreds of students through his teaching of undergraduate and graduate students at York University and Queen’s University. Eric earned economic degrees from York University and McMaster and a biology degree from Carleton. He is an active member of Canadian Society for Ecological Economics.

Registration for the series is only $250 per person as the Economic Literacy Project is supported by a grant from the Ivey Foundation. Space is limited.

For more information or to register please visit:

http://sustainabilitynetwork.ca/economic-literacy-project/

For questions please contact Paul Bubelis at :

paul@sustainabilitynework.ca