AARES President

Sorada Tapsuwan

Dr Sorada Tapsuwan is an environmental economist with experience working in agricultural and urban contexts. Sorada first joined AARES in 2006, attended her first AARES Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand, in 2007, and in the same year, she served as the President of the AARES Western Australia Branch. Sorada has been an active member of AARES ever since, regularly participating in AARES conferences and branch events. In 2019, Sorada accepted the nomination to become AARES Manager of Promotions and Development. In this role, she helped AARES attract sponsors for the annual conferences throughout the COVID pandemic. In 2022, Sorada accepted the nomination to become AARES President-Elect. Her responsibilities in this role in 2023 included overseeing a new strategic plan for AARES and putting together the Invited Speaker program for the 2024 AARES conference in Canberra. Sorada became AARES President at the AGM in February 2024. As AARES President in 2024, Sorada will work to build new relationships between AARES and applied environmental economics professional societies, and to further strengthen collaborations between AARES and applied agricultural economics associations.

Early in 2024, Sorada started a new role at Swinburne University as Associate Professor in Environmental Economics and Urban Transitions, after working as an applied economist at the CSIRO from 2006 to 2024. Sorada joined the CSIRO after finishing her PhD in Economics at the University of Queensland, when Dr Donna Brennan hired her to join a growing team of economists at the CSIRO. Sorada has extensive experience valuing environmental assets using a variety of techniques, including contingent valuation, choice modelling, travel cost and hedonic property price methods, across a wide area of research domains, such as marine park management, urban water demand and supply management, rural and irrigation water management, transportation, land use management, technology adoption, biosecurity management and climate change. In her most recent role at the CSIRO, as a Principal Research Scientist in the CSIRO Environment Business Unit, Sorada has led interdisciplinary research teams and worked closely with government and industry project partners to ensure that environmental values influence environmental policies and economic decision-making.

Her recent work has included quantifying and valuing the ecosystem services benefits of urban trees for Canberra, Darwin and Sydney and for trees on farms in Tasmania. She has also worked to integrate social psychological and economic models to promote better environmental outcomes internationally, including investigating barriers to circular economy in India and South East Asia, and integrating hydrological and economic modelling to improve water resource management in Peru. Sorada is on the Editorial Board of Agricultural Water Management.