Mathis Wackernagel is Co-founder and President of Global Footprint Network. He created the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph.D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporations and international NGOs on six continents and has lectured at more than 100 universities. Mathis has authored and contributed to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, numerous articles, reports and various books on sustainability that focus on embracing resource limits and developing metrics for sustainability. Mathis’ awards include the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, being a 2014 ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame Inductee, the 2013 Prix Nature Swisscanto, 2012 Blue Planet Prize, 2012 Binding Prize for Nature Conservation, the 2012 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, the 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment (jointly awarded with UNEP). He was also selected as number 19 on the en(rich) list identifying the 100 top inspirational individuals whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.

"Actually, awareness doesn't help. We are on the campaign to produce a desire for that transformation. Information is useless unless it's empowering. And of course, it has to be factual. If it's not factual, then it's going to be found out, and it also has to be relevant because otherwise, it's irrelevant. But if it's just relevant, it actually may just be counterproductive because if people see it as relevant but not empowering, they will use their brain to fight it. So that's why I think awareness campaigns don't work. We can only work on motivation, helping people to find a greater desire to get there, to say, yeah, that's what I want. A sense of agency that they say I can do something about it. Also, a sense of curiosity because we really don't know how to get there eventually.

So, it takes a bit more than just awareness and that's what we learned a bit painfully, obviously, over the last 30 years or painfully because in the beginning we just thought, Oh, why don't people just measure how many planets we have compared to how many we use? And once they see the number, it would be very obvious to them. So we were the first to start to - and still are I think - the main accounting approach to compare directly how big human activities are compared to what the planet can renew.”

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