Mathis Wackernagel

Last updated
Mathis Wackernagel
Born10 November 1962
Basel, Switzerland
EducationPh.D. in Community and Regional Planning
OccupationPresident
EmployerGlobal Footprint Network
Known forcreating the ecological footprint concept, promoting Earth Overshoot Day
Website http://footprintnetwork.org/

Mathis Wackernagel is a Swiss-born sustainability advocate. He is President of Global Footprint Network, an international sustainability think tank with offices in Oakland, California, and Geneva, Switzerland. The think-tank is a non-profit that focuses on developing and promoting metrics for sustainability.

Contents

After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he completed his Ph.D. in community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 1994. There, in his doctoral dissertation under Professor William Rees, he worked with Rees in creating the ecological footprint concept and developed the accounting methodology for it. [1] He has worked on sustainability issues for organizations in Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia and Australia. Wackernagel previously served as the director of the Sustainability Program at Redefining Progress in Oakland, California (1999 - 2003), and directed the Centre for Sustainability Studies / Centro de Estudios para la Sustentabilidad in Mexico (1995-2001). In 2004, he was also adjunct faculty at SAGE of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2010, he was appointed Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Visiting Professor at Cornell University (1 July 2011 – 30 June 2013). [2] [3]

Wackernagel has said that "Overshoot will ultimately liquidate the planet's ecological assets." [4] He also noted that "We look at all the problems in separate ways – climate change or biodiversity loss or food shortage – as if they were occurring independently. But they’re all symptoms of the same underlying theme: that our collective metabolism, the amount of things that humanity uses, has become very big compared to what Earth can renew." [5]

Awards and honors

In November 2022, the University of Stirling bestowed Wackernagel with an honorary doctorate. In his address, he proposed a "question with which to start everything – whether you design a policy or develop any new strategy [...]: do you love people?"

In 2018, Wackernagel and Zhifu Mi were the joint recipients of the second World Sustainability Award. [6] Wackernagel, along with Susan Burns, received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation in 2007. [7] He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern in 2007, a 2006 World Wide Fund for Nature Award for Conservation Merit, and the 2005 Herman Daly Award of the US Society for Ecological Economics. [8] With Global Footprint Network, he received the International Prize Calouste Gulbenkian 2008 (Lisbon, Portugal) “dedicated to the respect for biodiversity and defense of the environment in man’s relationship with nature.” [9]

In 2013, Wackernagel received the Prix Nature Swisscanto. [10] Prior, he received the 2012 Binding-Prize for Nature Conservation, [11] the bi-annual Kenneth Boulding Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, [12] and the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Glass Foundation (the latter two with William E. Rees). [13] He also received the 2011 Zayed International Prize for Environment [14] in the category "action leading to positive change in society." The Zayed prize recognized Wackernagel's contribution to “translate[ing] the complexity of humanity's impact on the environment and natural resources into a more understandable and actionable form. The concept of ‘ecological limits' and relating the demands of human beings to the planet's available ecological resources, has attracted and is catalyzing action among governments, business and civil society."

The (En)Rich List ranked Wackernagel as the 19th of the 100 most inspirational individuals whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures. [15]

Published works

Interviews with Wackernagel

Websites and videos

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natural capital</span> Worlds stock of natural resources

Natural capital is the world's stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms. Some natural capital assets provide people with free goods and services, often called ecosystem services. All of these underpin our economy and society, and thus make human life possible.

The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births. The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s. The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human ecology</span> Study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments

Human ecology is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The philosophy and study of human ecology has a diffuse history with advancements in ecology, geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, zoology, epidemiology, public health, and home economics, among others.

Overconsumption describes a situation where a consumer overuses their available goods and services to where they can't, or don't want to, replenish or reuse them. In microeconomics, this may be described as the point where the marginal cost of a consumer is greater than their marginal utility. The term overconsumption is quite controversial in use and does not necessarily have a single unifying definition. When used to refer to natural resources to the point where the environment is negatively affected, it is synonymous with the term overexploitation. However, when used in the broader economic sense, overconsumption can refer to all types of goods and services, including manmade ones, e.g. "the overconsumption of alcohol can lead to alcohol poisoning". Overconsumption is driven by several factors of the current global economy, including forces like consumerism, planned obsolescence, economic materialism, and other unsustainable business models and can be contrasted with sustainable consumption.

The ecological footprint measures human demand on natural capital, i.e. the quantity of nature it takes to support people and their economies. It tracks human demand on nature through an ecological accounting system. The accounts contrast the biologically productive area people use to satisfy their consumption to the biologically productive area available within a region, nation, or the world (biocapacity). Biocapacity is the productive area that can regenerate what people demand from nature. Therefore, the metric is a measure of human impact on the environment. As Ecological Footprint accounts measure to what extent human activities operate within the means of our planet, they are a central metric for sustainability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herman Daly</span> American economist (1938–2022)

Herman Edward Daly was an American ecological and Georgist economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States, best known for his time as a senior economist at the World Bank from 1988 to 1994. In 1996, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "defining a path of ecological economics that integrates the key elements of ethics, quality of life, environment and community."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William E. Rees</span>

William Rees, FRSC, is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at UBC.

Human overpopulation describes a concern that human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. The topic is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Happy Planet Index</span> Index of human well-being and environmental impact

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an index of human well-being and environmental impact that was introduced by the New Economics Foundation in 2006. Each country's HPI value is a function of its average subjective life satisfaction, life expectancy at birth, and ecological footprint per capita. The exact function is a little more complex, but conceptually it approximates multiplying life satisfaction and life expectancy and dividing that by the ecological footprint. The index is weighted to give progressively higher scores to nations with lower ecological footprints.

The global hectare (gha) is a measurement unit for the ecological footprint of people or activities and the biocapacity of the Earth or its regions. One global hectare is the world's annual amount of biological production for human use and human waste assimilation, per hectare of biologically productive land and fisheries.

In environmental science, a population "overshoots" its local carrying capacity — the capacity of the biome to feed and sustain that population — when that population has not only begun to outstrip its food supply in excess of regeneration, but actually shot past that point, setting up a potentially catastrophic crash of that feeder population once its food populations have been consumed completely. Overshoot can apply to human overpopulation as well as other animal populations: any life-form that consumes others to sustain itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earth Overshoot Day</span> Calculated calendar date when humanitys yearly consumption exceeds Earths replenishment

Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) is the calculated illustrative calendar date on which humanity's resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources that year. The term "overshoot" represents the level by which human population's demand overshoots the sustainable amount of biological resources regenerated on Earth. When viewed through an economic perspective, the annual EOD represents the day by which the planet's annual regenerative budget is spent, and humanity enters environmental deficit spending. EOD is calculated by dividing the world biocapacity, by the world ecological footprint, and multiplying by 365, the number of days in a year:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of environmental pollution</span>

The history of environmental pollution traces human-dominated ecological systems from the earliest civilizations to the present day. This history is characterized by the increased regional success of a particular society, followed by crises that were either resolved, producing sustainability, or not, leading to decline. In early human history, the use of fire and desire for specific foods may have altered the natural composition of plant and animal communities. Between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, agrarian communities emerged which depended largely on their environment and the creation of a "structure of permanence."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Footprint Network</span> Ecological organization

The Global Footprint Network was founded in 2003 and is an independent think tank originally based in the United States, Belgium and Switzerland. It was established as a charitable not-for-profit organization in each of those three countries. Its aim is to develop and promote tools for advancing sustainability, including the ecological footprint and biocapacity, which measure the amount of resources we use and how much we have. These tools aim at bringing ecological limits to the center of decision-making.

The biocapacity or biological capacity of an ecosystem is an estimate of its production of certain biological materials such as natural resources, and its absorption and filtering of other materials such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Blue Planet Prize recognises outstanding efforts in scientific research or applications of science that contribute to solving global environmental problems. The prize was created by the Asahi Glass Foundation in 1992, the year of the Rio Earth Summit, and since then the foundation has awarded the prize to two winners every year. In 2012, twenty of the Blue Planet Prize winners collaborated on a joint paper that was launched at the UN Environment Programme's Governing Council meeting in Nairobi on 20 February.

Context-Based Sustainability (CBS) – also known as Context-Based Accounting – is an open-source, multi/triple bottom line, integrated accounting methodology for measuring, managing, assessing and reporting the performance of organizations relative to upper and lower limits in, and demands for, vital resources or capitals in the world. As such, CBS is a performance accounting system that interprets performance through a sustainability lens, according to which impacts are sustainable if and only if, when generalized to a broader population, they would have the effect of preserving, producing and/or maintaining vital capitals at levels required to ensure human well-being. Impacts that would have the opposite effect are unsustainable, as are the activities that produce them.

Sustainable population refers to a proposed sustainable human population of Earth or a particular region of Earth, such as a nation or continent. Estimates vary widely, with estimates based on different figures ranging from 0.65 billion people to 9.8 billion, with 8 billion people being a typical estimate. Projections of population growth, evaluations of overconsumption and associated human pressures on the environment have led to some to advocate for what they consider a sustainable population. Proposed policy solutions vary, including sustainable development, female education, family planning and broad human population planning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecological overshoot</span> Demands on ecosystem exceeding regeneration

Ecological overshoot is the phenomenon which occurs when the demands made on a natural ecosystem exceed its regenerative capacity. Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal.

References

  1. ↑ Wackernagel, M. (1994). Ecological Footprint and Appropriated Carrying Capacity: A Tool for Planning Toward Sustainability (PDF) (PhD thesis). Vancouver, Canada: School of Community and Regional Planning. The University of British Columbia. OCLC   41839429. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-17. Retrieved 2011-12-13.
  2. ↑ "Mathis Wackernagel Biography".[ dead link ]
  3. ↑ "Pillsbury, Wackernagel named Rhodes professors - Cornell Chronicle". www.news.cornell.edu. April 2010.
  4. ↑ "Measuring our global impact". New Scientist environment blog. 2007-08-28. Retrieved 2 September 2007.
  5. ↑ "Humans now living on ecological credit". Deutsche Welle NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT - GLOBAL ISSUES. 2023-08-02. Retrieved 8 August 2023.
  6. ↑ "MDPI Sustainability Foundation". wsforum.org. Retrieved 2019-05-23.
  7. ↑ "Global Footprint Network". skoll.org. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
  8. ↑ "Awards – United States Society for Ecological Economics (USSEE)". www.ussee.org. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  9. ↑ "Apresentação - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian" (PDF). Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. 2008. Retrieved 2020-05-02.
  10. ↑ "NATUR: Hauptpreis". Archived from the original on 2013-05-07. Retrieved 2013-03-13.
  11. ↑ "Preisverleihung 2012". www.binding.li. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  12. ↑ "Boulding Award". The International Society for Ecological Economics. 15 January 2018. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
  13. ↑ "Blue Planet Prize : The Laureates - The Asahi Glass Foundation". www.af-info.or.jp. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  14. ↑ "Zayed International Prize for the Environment". www.zayedprize.org.ae. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  15. ↑ "Mathis Wackernagel". enrichlist.org. 7 March 2012.
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