Michael Tanner joined the Charles Darwin Foundation as a researcher in 2017 to lead the valuation of mangrove ecosystem services and later as part of the fisheries research team. His work on mangroves as part of the CDF lead to a publication in the journal Ecological Economics, was presented at the IMPAC4 conference and is featured in the Galapagos Report 2017-2018. As a current member of the fisheries research team, he has researched into market incentives for fisheries sustainability, focusing on information based schemes, chain value analysis, and consumer preferences in the Galapagos.

He obtained an MSc in Environmental Economics and Climate Change from the London School of Economics in 2016 with a Senescyt excellence scholarship, and was awarded the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative fellowship by the U.S State Department on 2017 leading to a short research stay at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2018, he received a Climate Protection fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation placing him as an environmental economics researcher at Heidelberg University, in Germany for the 2019-20 period.

His research interests are the economics of environmental policy, climate change, and natural resource management - with applications into market-based mechanisms for conservation, economic valuation of ecosystem services, and climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.