Elected Director
Gonzalo Delacámara is an economist who works worldwide (in 80+ countries: European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South Asia, having had legal residence in Chile, Colombia, Spain, Nicaragua, and the United Kingdom), specializing in the sustainable economic management of natural resources: climate, water, energy, atmospheric quality, oceans, biological diversity, and ecosystem services, etc., with an emphasis on their complex linkages with economic and social development patterns.
Gonzalo works as an international advisor on sustainability and environmental policy for multilateral organizations such as the European Commission, to which he is a ‘water policy advisor’ (through its DG Environment, Clean Water Unit), the European Parliament (to which he also advises on climate change policy), various agencies and programs of the United Nations system (UN Water, ECLAC, UNESCO, FAO, WHO-PAHO, UNDP, etc.), the World Bank Group (including its 2030 Water Resources initiative Group, but also the World Bank itself or the International Finance Corporation, IFC), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He is also a senior advisor and member of the OECD Water Governance Initiative. He has recently been elected a Board Member of Water Europe (formerly EU Water Supply and Sanitation Technology Platform), he is a member (first non-Dutch ever) of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Netherlands KWR institute on the integral water cycle, an appointed member of the Special Advisory Board of the International Desalination and Reuse Association (IDRA), and a member of the Mission Assembly on Healthy Oceans, Seas, Coastal, and Inland Waters of the European Union’s R&D&I framework programme (Horizon Europe). Likewise, he has also been appointed as a ‘visionary’ of the ‘Una Europa’ Future University Lab initiative, to reflect on the university of the future in Europe.
He is a Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Department of Water Economics at the IMDEA Agua Institute (Institute for Advanced Studies of Madrid). Until January 2021, he was also the Academic Director of the Water Economy Forum, a public debate initiative he founded with the complicity of Nobel Prize Laureates in Economics and Peace, such as professors George A. Akerlof (USA), Jean Tirole (France) or Mohan Munasinghe (Sri Lanka).
Gonzalo teaches at graduate level in different institutions. For example, he is a Senior Faculty Member of the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), which includes a digital design and manufacturing laboratory linked to MIT (FAB LAB BCN) and a professor at IE University and the School of Industrial Organization (EOI), where he was chosen in 2021 as the best teacher amongst 1,300+. He is also a mentor in international support programs for postgraduate researchers in Germany (Leibniz Institutes Association) or the United States (Techwomen), and co-author of a wide range of peer-reviewed scientific books and articles, as well as a keynote speaker at global events.
