Brock University’s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient’s academic discipline. This series of articles highlights this year’s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients on The Brock News.

From fisheries to waterborne illnesses to the bioremediation of waterways polluted by oilsands, Distinguished Professor Diane Dupont is an internationally known expert in water and its valuation.

She has worked with the Worldfish Centre in Malaysia, the International Joint Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., Health Canada and many other governmental and non-governmental bodies on projects related to one of the world’s most precious resources.

Dupont, a Professor of Economics, completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia with a focus on salmon fishery policy management, but when she came to Brock in 1990, she “cast around” for more locally useful research topics.

Working with her husband, fellow Professor of Economics Steven Renzetti, she began using techniques from her fisheries research to study water management and soon redirected her attention toward how people value goods and services not purchased at market — water, in particular.

“During my first sabbatical at Brock, I retooled and taught myself non-market valuation, and then reached out to people who I knew were experts in the field to work together,” Dupont says. “Since then, most of my career has been focused on using non-market valuation tools to look at different water issues, from water quality to ecosystem services to flood issues to recreation.”

She also credits forward-thinking efforts by federal funding bodies in support of multi-disciplinary work with opening up early avenues for her research.

“Working with the tri-agency-funded Canadian Water Network gave me exposure to microbiologists and hydrologists, and that was very instrumental in some of my early research looking at people’s willingness to pay to avoid microbial waterborne illnesses,” says Dupont. “That was the beginning of more interdisciplinary and sustainability-based work.”

Dupont was a founding member of Brock’s Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC) and a key collaborator in the Water Economics, Policy and Governance Network (WEPGN), a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded group that ran for eight years. She served as WEPGN’s Scientific Director from 2016 to 2020.

Along with the publications and research developments stemming from WEPGN, Dupont says she is proud of mentoring relationships she developed with network members, including current ESRC Director and Associate Professor of Geography and Tourism Studies Julia Baird and Lori Bradford at the University of Saskatchewan, now both Canada Research Chairs. Today, Bradford and Dupont are collaborating on research for Genome Canada.

Dupont’s early work on non-market valuation and intersectionality was at the leading edge of a movement across the field to consider multiple dimensions of individuals when making predictions — an evolution that has been aided by the development of techniques and technologies that enable economists to drill down into specifics.

“I’m very pleased to say that economics has moved toward recognizing that people are not one-sided and that we need to take more consideration of life situations, income and whether experiences affect the way people make decisions,” she says.

In addition to co-authoring the 2004 book, The Economics of the Environment and Natural Resources, co-editing a volume with Renzetti, and publishing dozens of academic papers in journals and books, Dupont frequently co-authors end-user reports for WaterSmart Niagara, Environment Canada, Pollution Probe and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, among many others.

In 2020, Dupont was named an Inaugural Fellow of the Canadian Resource and Environmental Economics Association (CREEA), and she has received both the Distinguished Research and Creative Activity Award and the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence from Brock.

“Economists are sometimes called in at the tail end of projects — scientists do their research and then want to know the cost or benefit associated with it,” she says. “But when we bring economics in at the beginning of a project, we can view the individual components holistically and focus on outcomes that can be explained to somebody who could make a policy difference. That’s where I see my work.”