Dr. Michael Shelly

Email: mshelly@buffalo.edu

Michael A. Shelly is the RENEW Environmental/Sustainability Economist and a Research Assistant Professor. His research areas include plastics recycling, tire recycling, the climate implications of waste, and the social burden of power outages.  He also teaches a master’s level course on environmental and sustainability economics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.  He is a member of UB’s carbon pricing group.

Dr. Shelly can assist with cost/benefit analysis, life cycle assessment, input-output analysis, habitat equivalency analysis, and economic willingness to pay methods for valuing ecosystem services.  He also provides assistance on project management and proposal preparation based on his experience in consulting.

Prior to UB, Dr. Shelly worked in environmental consulting for two decades, and before that in economic consulting specializing in the energy industry, and in the economics/strategy department at Unilever. plc.  During his time in consulting, he valued the environmental, ecological, and social benefits associated with both natural and engineered systems, valued the health impacts of pollution and worked on the climate change impacts of energy projects.

Examples of Dr. Shelly’s work on valuing natural resources include: assessing natural resource damage in Kuwait caused by the Gulf War; analyzing the impacts from contamination in Lake Onondaga (New York), from an invasive species in Lake Davis (California), and from coastal oil contamination in southern California; projecting the socioeconomic impacts of natural gas hydraulic fracturing in New York State; and serving as an independent reviewer for the Bureau of Land Management’s handbook on natural resource damage assessment.

Examples of Dr. Shelly’s work on the valuation of the health impacts of pollution include: leading the team that, for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, estimated the value of the health damages caused by the deliberate destruction of oil wells in Kuwait during the Gulf War; estimating the health benefits from air pollution controls at the world’s largest phosphate producer; and estimating the health costs of cigarette smoking.

Examples of Dr. Shelly’s work on climate change issues include: estimating the potential carbon credit revenues for a proposed advanced oxy-coal power plant in Jamestown; conducting a regulatory review for a large, coal-fired, circulating fluidized bed power plant in Pennsylvania; and evaluating the potential carbon credit revenues from a rehabilitated natural gas pipeline in the Republic of Georgia.

Dr. Shelly holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Edinburgh, a Master’s in Economics from the University of Warwick and a Bachelor’s of Science in Economics from Queen Mary, University of London.