Professor Mark Everard is a Vice President and formerly Chair of the Institution of Environmental Sciences (IES). Mark sat on the Council from 2004-15, and was the IES Vice Chair from 2006-2009 and Chair from 2009-12. He was elected Vice President on his retirement as Chair. He has worked on a wide diversity of sustainability and systems applications – in government, academia, business, NGO and international development settings – since completing his PhD in the early 1980s, with water, wildlife, wetlands and dependent human livelihoods as a linking theme.
As an early proponent of sustainable development, Mark has worked across many topic areas and has a profile in the world of wetlands, the sustainable use of chemicals, water management (mainly in a natural resource dependence context in the developing world), fisheries science, construction, and the global food system, with no boundaries between these topics as all are systemically interconnected.
A champion of awareness and action on environmental and sustainable development challenges throughout this time, Mark today spreads his efforts from academia (Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University and also Associate Professor of Ecosystem Services at the University of the West of England) to consultancy. He is also an Ambassador or Science Advisor to a range of NGOs in the UK and in India as well as to Intergovernmental Bodies including the Ramsar Commission (on wetlands). Mark also sees communication as vital to drive awareness and action on sustainable development, having published 43 books and 140+ peer-reviewed scientific papers (as of December 2024) as well as over 350 technical and popular magazine articles. He is also a regular contributor to national and local television and radio.
Mark is of the firm belief that everyone has a role to play in the challenge of sustainable development, and all of us have more agency than we generally allow ourselves to believe.
In rural regions of the developing world, people live closer to primary natural resources. In the much of the rest of the world, many of us have forgotten how we ultimately depend on ecosystems for all of our needs no matter how sophisticated our lifestyles and degree of insulation from their biophysical underpinnings. We are all united in our dependence on the ecosystems with which we co-evolved, and with all who share and are a part of them, and have responsibility for stewarding them more wisely.
