Michael Gillenwater, Executive Director, Co-founder, Dean
Michael Gillenwater co-founded the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, and serves as its Dean and Executive Director. Michael has dedicated his career to the development of the policies and infrastructure needed to produce highly credible environmental information that can serve as the basis of market and other compliance mechanisms, especially monitoring and verification policies and management and reporting systems for greenhouse gases and other ecosystem services.
Michael has worked on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change policy since 1995. He co-developed the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Program within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Michael’s work at EPA concentrated on development of national systems for producing high quality greenhouse gas emission inventories and on designing the international compliance process under the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Kyoto Protocol. He was lead author of the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks reports published from 1997 through 2003.
Michael is on the rosters of technical experts and is actively engaged in the work of the UNFCCC and as a lead author of several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the latter of which were recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize. He developed and teaches the courses that certify experts to serve on compliance review teams under the Kyoto Protocol and supports both the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board and the Joint Implementation Steering Committee as a methodology expert. He was also a core advisor to World Resources Institute and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development on the revised edition of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
Michael is also at Princeton University’s Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program (STEP) where he is completing a doctorate in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His research is focused on renewable energy and emission markets, as well as monitoring and verification issues with climate change policies. As part of his academic work, Michael is an adjunct faculty member at the Harvard University ExtensionSchool where he teaches courses on sustainability and greenhouse gas management.
Previously, Michael was Director of the EcoRegistry® Program at Environmental Resources Trust. Prior to joining ERT, Michael was first with the U.S. EPA’s Office of Policy, Planning and Evaluation and then EPA’s Clean Air Markets Division. He has also worked for Sandia National Laboratories and ICF Consulting’s Global Environmental Issues Group.
He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University and masters degrees in environmental engineering and “Technology and Policy” from MIT. He also has a masters from the University of Sussex in Evolutionary Adaptive Systems, where he was a William J. Fulbright Scholar.
