United States of America

Albert F. Appleton (Al Appleton) is an international consultant with interlocking expertise in water resource and water utility management, infrastructure and public finance, land use and landscape preservation, and promoting sustainable development through innovative financial strategies such as Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). His most recent work includes developing a new system of financing environmental infrastructure for the City of Shanghai water and sewer system, creating a program to integrate biofuel development with the restoration of Tisza River floodplain in Hungary, and assisting the implementation of payment for ecosystem service programs in the Northern Andes. Mr. Appleton is also a member of the Katoomba Group (a worldwide network of experts on the use of market tools to address environmental problems), a member of the Advisory Board of the Reason Foundation, a Libertarian think tank, a special consultant to Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), a new investment fund seeking to provide market rate investment returns from innovatively funding American land preservation initiatives, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the City University Hunter College graduate program in Urban Affairs and Planning, where he teaches a graduate seminar on Sustainability and its economics. . . During the first half of the 1990s, Mr. Appleton served as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Director of the New York City Water and Sewer system, where he developed and implemented such programs as the New York City comprehensive Catskill mountain watershed protection program and urban-rural partnership and New York's comprehensive water conservation program that permanently reduced New York City's water use by 300 million gallons of water a day or 20% of total consumption. Each program saved the City of New York billions of dollars. He also directed New York's cost saving innovations in the use of natural infrastructure (i.e. the Staten Island Bluebelt System); and carried out a fundamental restructuring of New York's water and sewer financing systems and its environmental and infrastructure management programs that ended a decade of runaway water and sewer rates, while providing the additional resources needed to make DEP's environmental and infrastructure construction initiatives a long term success and a paradigm for a successful ESG approach. . Mr. Appleton has also served as a volunteer officer or director of many conservation organizations and NGOs, most notably as President of the New York City Audubon Society and as a member of the National Advisory Board of Trust for Public Land; in which capacities he saved or restored over 1000 acres of wetlands and adjacent natural habitat in New York City through the Buffer the Bay and the Harbor Herons urban nature refuge programs. Mr. Appleton's most recent writings are: "Sustainability: A Practitioner's Reflections," in the journal Technology in Society; "China, the Environment and Planning," in the volume, A Decade of Planning in China, by James Jao; and "Non-Structural Alternatives for Meeting Water Utility Capital and Operating Needs," a paper presented to the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Water Environment Federation. Mr. Appleton professionally is trained as an administrative lawyer (Yale Law School).