Costa Carras, born in London in 1938, read philosophy and ancient history at Oxford. After studying economics at Harvard he worked for many years in shipping in London.   He now lives in Athens and has acquired extensive experience in many fields including conservation and ecology, politics, culture and religion.

In 1972 with his wife Lydia he founded Greece's leading environmental organization, Elliniki Etairia (Society for the Environment and the Cultural Heritage), of which he was President 1972-1975 and 2001-2008. Since 1973 he has represented Elliniki Etairia in Europa Nostra, the federation of European conservation organizations, and is that body's longest-serving Vice-President.   

He is a founding member of Friends of Cyprus in London, for whose annual Report be he often writes, and of the Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe, where he serves on the Board as Rapporteur for the Joint History Project, which has produced six workbooks covering various periods of the region’s past, most recently the period 1945-2008.

He was co-chairman of the British Council of Churches' Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine in the 1980s, when he also organized the ground-breaking 1988 meeting on religion and the environment in Patmos as a lay Archon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. A relevant article is “Environment and Security: Towards a Systemic Crisis of Humanity?” which appeared in “Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation” edited by John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz (Fordham University Press, June 2013)