Deputy Chair

Dr. Vasseur is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Brock University where she is also a member of the Women and Gender Studies program and the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, one of the five transdisciplinary spaces at the university. Since 2014, she holds the UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability: form local to global at Brock. She currently leads the thematic group on Climate Change Adaptation of the Commission for Ecosystem Management of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Her interest for women in science and higher education stems from various involvement at the national and international levels. She is currently the President of the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology (CCWESTT) and the President-Elect of the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists (INWES). Her research program is highly interdisciplinary and links issues such as community-based ecosystem management, climate change adaptation and resilience and sustainable agriculture. Her community-research work with the City of greater Sudbury led her to receive in 2011 the Latornell Pioneers Award from Conservation Ontario. She is currently in the codirection committee of a large project on Coastal Communities Challenges in the face of Climate Change, funded by the Social and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has done over hundred publications and more than 200 presentations as a researcher. Her work focuses not only on Canada but also internationally such as in China, where she is a Minjiang Scholar at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University.

Commission Chair

Chair of the World Commission on Ecosystem Management of the International Union for Conservation of Nature since 2016. Senior Director of Climate Change and Biodiversity Policy at Conservation International Colombia, since 2009. She previously served as Director of Ecosystems at the Ministry of Environment and Deputy Director of Geography at the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzí in Colombia. She is an Anthropologist from the Universidad de los Andes, specialised in Geography and Rural Surveys and Msc in Ecology from ITC in the Netherlands. She has more than 25 years of research experience in territorial ecology, land use planning and environmental policies. In recent years she has been promoting globally the issues of Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Nature-based Solutions as a response to the biodiversity crisis and climate change, among others.