William Rees has taught at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning since 1969. He founded SCARP’s environment and resource planning concentration and from 1994 to 1999 served as director of the school. William’s teaching and research focuses on the public policy and planning implications of global environmental trends and the necessary ecological conditions for sustainable socio economic development. William is best known as the originator of ecological footprint analysis. His 1996 book on this method, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (co-authored with Mathis Wackernagel), has been widely translated across the globe. William is a founding member and recent past president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a co-investigator in the Global Integrity Project, aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation; a fellow of Post-Carbon Institute; and a founding fellow of One Earth. In 1997, UBC gave William a Killam Research Prize, and in 2000, the Vancouver Sun named him one of British Columbia’s top public intellectuals. William was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2006.
