Reverend Professor Jasper Kenter
Honorary Professor

Profile

Biography

Jasper Kenter is an Honorary Professor and former Reader in Deliberative Ecological Economics at the Department for Environment and Geography, and previously led the MSc programme in Environmental Economics and Environmental Management. Jasper is also a Professorial Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University, directs the social enterprise Ecologos Research Ltd, works as a spiritual counsellor and is an ordained One Spirit Interfaith Minister.

He is an interdisciplinary researcher in sustainable development, conservation and environmental management issues with a specialisation in ecological, wellbeing and post-growth economics, and public and stakeholder deliberation.

His research has focused on people’s values around nature. He enjoys a broad view of the notion of value and values, looking through the lenses of economics, ecology, ethics, psychology, and spiritual practice, and has a particular interest in how social processes shape values and in ways we can integrate economic and deliberative methodologies to better incorporate shared values of nature into decision-making.

Jasper has also worked in the broader area of new economics, developing principles for economic thinking and policy that focuses on holistic wellbeing for people and planet.

He has authored over 75 peer reviewed publications, published in journals such as Nature, PNAS and Nature Sustainability, which have been cited over 10,000 times. His work has received funding from European, UK, Norwegian and Finnish research councils. He has lead or co-lead multiple large UKRI and EU projects on marine coastal community resilience, coastal heritage, marine heritage, and marine renewables, and has played leading roles in the UK Marine Ecosystems Research and Valuing Nature Programmes. He was also a lead author of the Values Assessment (2018-2022) for the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and was principal investigator for the second phase of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (2012-2014), leading work on shared, plural and cultural values of ecosystems.

For his cross-disciplinary research in the Solomon Islands (South Pacific) on environmental values, Jasper received prizes from the European Society for Ecological Economics, the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Geographical Field Group. His work on public engagement with marine spatial planning was nominated for two awards by the Royal Town Planning Institute. The collective work by IPBES experts was awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity.

Jasper has also lectured at the Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, St Andrews, Leicester and Highlands and Islands. He was an adjunct lecturer at the University of New England (Australia, 2014-2017), Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh (2015-2018), and Principal Investigator at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (2014-2018).