Margaret Walls

Margaret Walls is the director of the Climate Risks and Impacts Program, Adaptation and Resilience Program, and Environmental Justice Initiative at Resources for the Future (RFF) an independent nonprofit research organization in Washington, DC. Walls is an an economist and senior fellow at RFF as well. Dr. Walls’s research focuses on issues related to resilience and adaptation to extreme events, ecosystem services provision and valuation, and public lands, outdoor recreation, and conservation policies. Her research on public lands includes an analysis of the local economic impacts of national monument designations, published in Science Advances in 2020, and a review of public lands conflicts and values, published in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, also in 2020. She is currently measuring the impact of wildfire and wildfire smoke on outdoor recreation on public lands in the western U.S. Dr. Walls has also written widely on options for parks and conservation funding and optimal targeting of conservation investments. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of 39 book chapters and published reports. Dr. Walls serves on the board of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. She was previously an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Walls holds a PhD in economics from the University of California-Santa Barbara and a BS in agricultural economics from the University of Kentucky.