Mayer Hillman joined Policy Studies Institute in 1970 as Head of its Environment and Quality of Life Research Programme. In 1992, he was appointed Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Institute. His research has been concerned with transport, urban planning, energy conservation, health promotion and environment policies, notably climate change and its implications.

For close on 40 years, he has called for environmentally-conscious attitudes to inform public policy and for the moral imperative of taking account of the needs of future as well as of present generations. He was one of the first proponents of carbon rationing as the only realistic way for the world’s population to prevent serious damage from climate change.

On his 70th birthday, Policy Studies Institute presented Dr. Hillman with a festschrift –Ahead of Time – in which fifteen prominent UK thinkers and academics contributed to “a celebration of Mayer’s unique combination of qualities: great intellectual productivity and originality, tenacity in argument and … his willingness to speak truth to power”. He has been the subject of personal profiles, eg ‘An Inconvenient Man’ (Matthew Taylor), Fabian Review, in 2007.

He is the author or co-author of over 50 books including Reviving the City (with Tim Elkin and Duncan McLaren), 1991; Wealth Beyond Measure: An atlas of new economics (with Paul Ekins and Robert Hutchison), 1992; ‘In Favour of the Compact City’ in The Compact City (eds. M. Jenks, E. Burton and K. Williams), 1996; and ‘Why climate change must top the agenda’ and ‘Carbon budget watchers’ in Town and Country Planning, October 1998. In 2004, together with Tina Fawcett, he completed How We Can Save the Planet, commissioned by Penguin Books and more recently in the US The Suicidal Planet: our last chance to prevent climate catastrophe.