Paula DiPerna

Paula DiPerna is a pioneer and authority on modern environmentalism and environmental finance, a woman who has made history on many issues with her personal blend of leadership, fearlessness, curiosity and original thinking.

She cold-approached Pope Francis, and got a meeting with his closest advisors, urging a reconsideration of the Pope’s stance on carbon markets, eventually meeting the Pope himself. Working as a film writer with oceans explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, DiPerna traveled to remote and far-flung corners. She was the first woman ever to put a foot on remote Funk Island in the North Atlantic and the first American given permission by Fidel Castro personally to enter the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay from the Cuban side of the border and cross the barbed wire DMZ.

DiPerna has not only been instrumental in the development of carbon markets and ESG investing but has worked both behind the scenes and at the forefront of key issues of our time.

DiPerna spearheaded the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the world’s first cap-and-trade system to address climate change and put the idea of 'pricing carbon” on the map' a key topic in her book and for the world. She was integral to the creation of China’s first carbon market pilot as well.

DiPerna’s record of firsts crosses genres. She wrote the first travel guide to Cuba in English to appear as US-Cuba relations had begun to thaw, as well as helping secure the release of 50 political prisoners during the Cousteau expedition to Cuba. Working with Cousteau and Heads of State world wide, she helped secure a permanent ban on minerals and oil exploration in Antarctica.

Her book, "Oakhurst…The Birth and Rebirth of America’s First Golf Course", was the first book to unearth the wry story of how an eccentric quintet of men living on the frontier of West Virginia in the 1880s brought golf course design in America, without even knowing it.

Her novel, "The Discoveries of Mrs. Christopher Columbus", put forward the radical proposition that the well-connected well-born Portuguese wife of Christopher Columbus, who did exist, used her networks to raise her husband’s social standing and gave him his great idea of sailing west in the first place. DiPerna’s fictional theory is highly plausible, and a voyage we have never imagined before.

Her non-fiction "Cluster Mystery: Epidemic and the Children of Woburn, Mass", became a touchstone and was the first book to dig into the causes of an infamous water pollution case.

Pricing the Priceless continues DiPerna’s cutting edge.