Austin Troy

Austin Troy, PhD is Principal and Co-Founder of Spatial Informatics Group, where he has worked on a wide range of projects for numerous clients, focusing particularly on ecosystem services mapping, valuation and assessment and urban sustainability. Austin also co-leads the Ecosystem Services Team as SIG. In addition to his private sector work, Dr. Troy is Professor and Chair at the University of Colorado Denver’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning. His academic work addresses issues at the intersection of urban and regional planning and environmental sustainability, focusing particularly on urban green infrastructure. He is author of the book The Very Hungry City (Yale University Press, 2012), which is about how cities consume energy, what rising global energy prices will mean for cities in the future, and what cities can do today reduce their energy footprint without compromising their quality of life. He also lead-edited and co-authored the book Living on the Edge: Economic, Institutional and Management Perspectives on Wildfire Hazard in the Urban Interface (Elsevier Press, 2007), and has authored dozens of journal articles and book chapters. His work has been covered in numerous media venues, including public radio stations across the country, The Boston Globe, Vancouver Sun, Grist, Baltimore Sun, Atlantic Monthly’s Atlantic Cities magazine, Slate, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, and many others. He is an affiliate of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics and co-principal investigator of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, one of the National Science Foundation’s two urban Long-Term Ecological Research projects. He sits on the governing board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. In addition, he served for four years as a planning commissioner for the city of Burlington VT. Educated at Yale College (B.A.), Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (M.F.), and University of California Berkeley (Ph.D.), he is originally from Los Angeles, CA and now lives in Denver.