Spash studied economics at the University of Stirling gaining a Bachelor of Arts with Honours. His dissertation was entitled "Sulphur Emission and Deposition in Europe: A Problem of Transfrontier Pollution". He went on to study for a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia with a thesis entitled "Measuring the Tangible Benefits of Environmental Improvement: An Economic Appraisal of Regional Crop Damages due to Ozone. He then completed a Ph.D. with Distinction in Economics at the University of Wyoming in 1993, specialising in Resource and Environmental Economics and Public Finance. His dissertation, "Intergenerational Transfers and Long-Term Environmental Damages: Compensation of Future Generations for Global Climate Change due to the Greenhouse Effect", was awarded the University of Wyoming Outstanding Dissertation in the Social Sciences, 1993. Spash was elected Vice-president of the European Society for Ecological Economics by the delegates at the inaugural meeting of the society held at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France in 1996. He was elected to a second term by ESEE members at the Society General Meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in 1998. He then served two terms as ESEE President, 2000-2006, elected by postal ballot of the membership. During this time he helped write new democratic constitutions for both the ESEE and ISEE, established the ESEE Newsletter with Ben Davies as editor, set-up the societies committee structure and organised European conferences. From 1996 until 2001 he was a lecturer at the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge and director of the research institute Cambridge Research for the Environment. He then moved to the University of Aberdeen where he held the Research Chair in Environmental and Rural Economics and was Head of the Socio-Economic Research Programme at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute. In 2006 Spash was appointed as Chief Executive Officers’ Science Leader at the CSIRO, Australia's federal government agency responsible for scientific research. After finishing a critical paper about emissions trading - which had already passed the peer review process - the agency intervened and pushed for substantial changes. The behaviour of CSIRO led to controversial debates within the scientific community and Nature reported extensively on the conflict. In the course of the controversy, Spash left the agency at the end of 2009.
Publications (inter alia)
Clive L. Spash . Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Clive L. Spash and Karin Dobernig. Theories of sutainable Consumption. In Spash, Clive L. Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Clive L. Spash and Clemens Gattringer. The Ethical Failures of Climate Economics. In Adrian Walsh, Sade Hormio and Duncan Purves The Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Clive L. Spash. This changes nothing: The Paris Agreement to ignore reality. Globalizations 13 no.6: 928-933.
Clive L. Spash. The Brave New World of Carbon Trading. New Political Economy, 15, no. 2: 169-195.
Clive L. Spash Censoring science in research officially. Environmental Values 19 no. 2: 141-146.
Clive L. Spash. Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics. London: Routledge.
Martin O’Connor and Clive L. Spash. Valuation and the Environment: Theory, Methods and Practice. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Clive L. Spash. The political economy of nature. Review of Political Economy, 7 no.3: 279-293.
Clive L. Spash and Ian A. Simpson. Utilitarian and rights-based alternatives for protecting sites of special scientific interest. Journal of Agricultural Economics. 45 no.1: 15-26
