President's letter
Dear colleagues,

It is my great pleasure to write this message as EAAERE President to you. At first, I would like to thank Professor Kazuhiro Ueta (Kyoto University), our founding President from 2010 to 2012. He is the key person who makes EAAERE’s founding and start-up come true. Without his strong dedication and hard-work, there would not be EAAERE here to serve as a platform for our members and scholars and economists around the world to present research findings, as well as to exchange ideas and stimulate researches. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to all of the members of our first Board of Directors and Officers. All of them are dedicated volunteers who have invested enormous amount of time and energy to enhance the capacity of our Association in the last two years.

As all of those who have attended our 2nd Congress held on February 2-4 on the campus of Padjadjaran University in Bandong, Indonesia know this Congress was a great success and had set a new standard of our annual Congress. The scientific committee chaired by Prof. Akihisa Mori and the local organizing committee headed by Prof. Arief Anshory Yusuf deserve our sincere gratitude since they have done a great job of putting together a rich program in a comfortable city. In addition to outstanding keynote speeches, we have pre-congress events, parallel sessions, and our General Assembly. The most important thing is that the comfortable weather and the easy-going academic environment had made us very actively discussing ideas generated from speeches and papers during and after every session.

Issues relating to the environmental quality, biodiversity and natural resources in Asia, particularly in East Asia, concern us most. As the East Asia region has experienced high growth rates of the economy and population in previous decades, we have witnessed many serious problems of environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, natural resources depletion and unsustainable growth in the region. In addition, East Asia region is famous of its very diverse ethnic groups, culture heritage and socio-economic conditions. All of these make East Asia a very good place for conducting environmental and natural resource economic researches since we environmental economists can easily discover many unique problems, issues and cases which worth more in-depth research. The results of researches have contributed greatly to the development of environmental and natural resource economics as a profession. I myself have benefited a lot from this research environment in the last three decades.

EAAERE is a young professional association of environmental and natural resource economists. The members of the Board and Officers will devote themselves to make the Association healthier and more vibrant in terms of annual congress, journal publication, scholarly exchanges, membership and financials in the coming two years. Environmental Economics and Policy Studies (EEPS), which is the official journal of our Association and the Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, under the editorial leadership of Professors Hosoda and Akao, has published many good papers regularly. Since this year, regular members are entitled to access EEPS papers via website freely as one of member benefits. I would like to encourage you to publish your excellent research findings in this journal.

Please mark on your calendar the dates for our 2013 Congress which will be held on Feb 20-22 (Wed- Fri), 2013, at Huangshan City, a very beautiful resort area in China. Let us thank Professors Ma Zhong of Renmin University of China, Professor Zhang Shiqiu of Peking University and Professor Wang Jinnan of Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning in advance for their willingness to generously devote their valuable time in organizing the Congress. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

Daigee Shaw
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
President, EAAERE