Ed's main expertise is natural resource and development economics as well as the interface between economics and ecology. He has served as a consultant and policy analyst for a variety of national, international and non-governmental agencies, including many UN organizations, the World Bank and the OECD. He has authored over 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, written or edited 22 books, and published in popular journals. He is consistently ranked among the top 12 cited environmental economists globally, and Google Scholar lists him as currently having 44,000 citations to his scholarly works, including over18,000 since 2012. Barbier was elected a 2015 Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

Edward B. Barbier is a Research Partner in the Greening Growth Partnership project.