María Loureiro García is Professor in the Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and scientific director of the interuniversity center of the three Galician universities in economics and business, ECOBAS. Previously, she has been a professor at Colorado State University (USA), returning to the USC through the Ramón y Cajal Program. 

Her field of research is the economics of climate change and natural resources. She is the author of 110 articles, of which 94 are indexed in the Web of Science (h index=43), and is included in the top 2% of the most influential scientists in the world, according to Stanford University (World's Top 2% Scientists ranking). She is also editor of the journal Ecological Economics, and is on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics, or the Spanish Journal of Agricultural Research, among others. 

She has won several awards for her research career, highlighting the regional prize "Premio de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales-categoría Joven" of the Xunta de Galicia (2006), the "Valentín Paz Andrade" Prize of the USC and Consello Económico e Social (2014), the Prize of the Asociación Hispano-Portuguesa de Economía Ambiental, for the best article published in the biennium 2018-2019 (year 2020). Since 2022 she is a member of the scientific committee of the Real Instituto Elcano, and a numerary member of the Real Academia Gallega de Ciencias, being the first woman in the field of economics. Furthermore, she colaborates in the programe 'Galica por Diante' in the Galician radio, every Wednesday.

She is also active in international scientific associations where she has been Vice-President of the European Association for Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, EAERE (2018-2020). She is also the local organizer of the international congress on Bioeconomics, to be held at the University of Santiago de Compostela from August 30-September 1, 2023, where the impact of climate change on marine ecosystems will be analyzed.  So far, she has supervised 9 doctoral theses, and more than 25 final degree projects, and has participated in numerous research and knowledge transfer projects, both national and international. 

Regarding her transfer activity, her work on the valuation of environmental and economic impacts caused by the Prestige ship, used as expert evidence by the Prosecutor's Office in the trial of the Prestige ship, stands out. This was the first time in Spain that an environmental catastrophe of this nature was assessed with a socioeconomic report. The importance of this expert report was subsequently ratified in a Supreme Court ruling in 2016. She is also among the authors of the foresight report commissioned by the Government of Spain "Spain 2050," contributing in matters related to the economics of climate change and the economic impacts of forest fires.

She is currently studying the socio-economic impacts of climate change on Spanish society. She does so using primary sources, satellite data, and geo-referenced social network data. In her latest work she demonstrates that awareness of the problem of climate change is increasing in Spanish society, while the gap of the impacts derived from it is magnifying.

Ongoing Research Projects