Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics, political ecology and water policy. He was born in Athens, Greece, in 1972. In 2008 he completed a Marie Curie International Fellowship at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. His research focused on socio-environmental coevolution, adaptive co-governance in large river basins, and droughts and social adaptation. He has a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors degree in Chemistry, both from Imperial College, London. He has worked in the past at the Office of Scientific and Technological Assessment of the European Parliament (1995-1996) contributing to the revision of the EU water directives and served as a consultant for UNEP-MAP, PAP-RAC preparing guidelines for integrated urban water management in coastal areas (2004).
His research forms part of the inter-disciplinary field of environmental studies, that is, the study of the social and bio-physical causes of environmental degradation. He is an expert in water resources and policy, including droughts, urban water conservation and participatory governance. He is motivated by a quest to cross conceptual divides between the social and the natural domains as in his collaboration with R. Norgaard at the University of California at Berkeley, where they developed the concept of socio-ecological coevolution. He is interested in the political-economic roots of environmental degradation and its uneven distribution along lines of power, income, class or race. His current work explores the idea of sustainable de-growth: a smooth economic downscaling to a sustainable future where we can live better with less.