People

William Rees

School of Community and Regional Planning

School of Community and Regional Planning #433-6333 Memorial Road Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2 Canada
Phone: (604) 822-2937Fax: (604) 822-3787E-mail: mailto:wrees@interchange.ubc.ca
Perspective on Sustainability PlanningCurrent CVRecent PublicationsRecent Masters Theses and ProjectsProfessional and Community Experience

Biographical Sketch
William Rees received his PhD in population ecology from the University of Toronto and has taught at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) since 1969-70. He founded SCARP’s ‘Environment and Resource Planning’ concentration and from 1994 to 1999 served as director of the School. Prof Rees’ teaching and research focus on the public policy and planning implications of global environmental trends and the necessary ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development. Much of this work is in the realm of human ecology and ecological economics where Prof Rees is best known for inventing ‘ecological footprint analysis.’ Dr Rees’ book on the concept, Our Ecological Footprint (co-authored with then PhD student Dr Mathis Wackernagel) was published in 1996 and is now available in English, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian and Spanish. Prof Rees is a founding member and recent past-President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. He is also a co-investigator in the ‘Global Integrity Project,’ aimed at defining the ecological and political requirements for biodiversity preservation. Building on these interests, his present book project examines factors that seem to drive the repeating cycle of human societal collapse. A dynamic speaker, Prof Rees has been invited to lecture on