Professor Anant Sudarshan wins prestigious environmental research prize

Professor Anant Sudarshan wins prestigious environmental research prize

Professor Anant Sudarshan and his co-author Eyal Frank (University of Chicago) have won the 2026 Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics for their paper The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India.

The prestigious prize is awarded every other year by the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE) to the paper which, in the opinion of an expert panel of judges, is the best paper in the field of environmental and resource economics.

Anant and Eyal’s winning paper was published in the October 2024 issue of the American Economic Review. Their findings on the human health consequences of the accidental collapse of the Indian vulture population caused by changes in farming practices received global press attention.

Their research concluded that the functional extinction of vultures—efficient scavengers that removed carcasses from the environment—increased human mortality by over 4 percent because of a large negative shock to sanitation, with an estimated cost of $69.4 billion per year.

The EAERE prize committee said “Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan receive the Erik Kempe Award for an insightful contribution to the measurement of [the] value of ecosystem services which, in turn, is essential for cost-benefit analysis of conservation policy.

“By recovering the mechanisms underlying species collapse, the results may inform efforts to recover [the] vulture in India, and more broadly show how local population extinction can be used to analyze the effects of species extinction on human well-being.”

EAERE also said that Frank and Sudarshan “contributed substantially” to both academic research on species collapse and conservation policy.

• Frank, Eyal, and Anant Sudarshan. 2024. "The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India." American Economic Review 114 (10): 3007–40.DOI: 10.1257/aer.20230016