Mathis Wackernagel

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.

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.

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.

Wackernagel, along with Susan Burns, received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation in 2007.

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.

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.”

In 2010, he was appointed Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Visiting Professor at Cornell University (1 July 2011 – 30 June 2013).

Wackernagel has said that "Overshoot will ultimately liquidate the planet's ecological assets."

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."

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?"

He also received the 2011 Zayed International Prize for Environment 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."

Prior, he received the 2012 Binding-Prize for Nature Conservation, the bi-annual Kenneth Boulding Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Glass Foundation (the latter two with William E. Rees).

In 2013, Wackernagel received the Prix Nature Swisscanto.

In 2018, Wackernagel and Zhifu Mi were the joint recipients of the second World Sustainability Award.

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