Joseph Alcamo is a United States. environmental scientist who is serving as Chief Scientist of the United Nations Environment Programme.
Education
Alcamo received a Bachelor"s degree in civil engineering in 1973 and a Master"s degree in environmental engineering from Manhattan College, and earned his Doctor of Philosophy for civil-environmental engineering at the University of California.
Career
From 1973 to 1980, he worked as en environmental engineer in the private sector, before changing to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1981 and from there to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria in 1982. From 1992 to 1996, Alcamo worked at the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. Since 1996, Alcamo is a professor at University of Kassel in Germany, working as the head of the university"s Center for Environmental Systems He has taken a temporary leave of absence from the institute, however, to work as the Chief Scientist for United Nations Environment Programme until 2014.
Alcamo published numerous articles and books about environmental subjects, many of them focussing on the modeling of environmental changes and the effects of global warming.