2026 Lifetime Achievement Award

Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello, again. Here we are with a very prestigious award and a person who is familiar to many IAIA members, and that is Wes Fischer, who is here as the recipient of IAIA’s 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award, which really stands by itself. It’s a very unique award for someone who has contributed so much to both IAIA and to impact assessment generally. And I can think of no better recipient than Wes, who remains as active and as thoughtful as ever in terms of contributing and mentoring a lot of people within the organization. So Wes, congratulations on the award. Welcome to this little video. Let’s start off with an easy one. Tell us what you’re most proud of — highlights through your career.

Wes Fisher, Award Winner: You know, this association is one of the few instruments under law to actually address environmental impacts and environmental problems. And so it is a special honor, particularly when I look at the past recipients of the award, and I feel very humble because I don’t measure up to many of the top professionals who I look up to. Particularly, I’m grateful to all the IAIA members who are providing this award, but especially to the membership that is trying to grapple with the issues of getting the global commons back into what planetary boundary Earth systems folks are calling safe operating space. I think we’re all grappling with moving beyond talking about the nine planetary boundaries and their impacts to actually trying to move towards solutions. And so your position as CEO with your background in working with the financial sector and knowledge of risk assessment really moves our association in the right direction when it comes to actually finding solutions. I think we may find more support through the networks of financial institutions. You introduced us to the NFGS network of banks in Europe, Equator banks, and we’re learning about the red flags that actuaries are raising. The data is getting increasingly better with satellite monitoring and drone monitoring and ground truthing with simple, inexpensive devices like our cell phones. So this data set is getting better and better, which means predictions, modeling, simulations get better and better. So, well, I’m wandering away from…

Gary: I love this. You get straight into it — I asked you about your lifetime highlights, and here you are looking for find solutions for the future. Let’s jog back a little bit — I’m going to be more specific. How early on in your career did you start to really feel that urgency about climate change, about effects? Was that always the case or what was the evolution of that?

Wes: This happened to me. I was born on the prairie in Manitoba, in Winnipeg. My dad was a telecommunications engineer who moved to California to get warmer and ended up in Silicon Valley. He went on a business trip to South America, and I was 12 years old. We came in — we landed in Caracas and drove in from the airport, and here’s this 12-year-old boy seeing the barrios. Then we went on to Rio, and there I was looking out at the favelas in Rio.

And so that’s kind of where it started, because I saw that contrast between the Silicon Valley lifestyle and the rest of the world. We have half the world’s population living on less than seven dollars a day — that’s four billion people. And so that’s really where it started. I ended up being a biology major interested in the natural world and species. It went from there to my entering the Peace Corps, going to Uganda, being a biology and science teacher in Uganda. And from there, now I have to dig deep. I ended up after Peace Corps in Minnesota in the ecology and behavioral biology program at the University of Minnesota. My early biology stuff was at Stanford. And that led to, at that time, it was around Rachel Carson time, a little bit after — and there was an early grouping of the Environmental Defense Fund, who took Rachel’s words and moved them into law. And that’s part of what IAIA’s value is, that the IA practitioners are operating under NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. I had a student group — we were part of the early lobbying for NEPA. But it was Rachel, it was a lawyer named Yannacone, it was Stony Brook University, the scientists working on the DDT issue and the near extinction of the Peregrine Falcon as the shells became thin from DDT — that brought the suit that led to the banning of DDT and led to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, which the world has then adapted to their needs.

Having these things under law is really important. And that’s a good reason for why I’m here. But there was more to it than this. I went on to work for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. In 1981, I joined USAID and first as a under contract and later as a Foreign Service Officer. So from 1981 up through that period, I ended up with Charlotte Bingham, an IAIA Past President and a receiver of this award, doing trainings all over Africa, mainly in Eastern Southern Africa, and for small-scale activities, working with NGOs and doing field-based training. So we would go out to where the NGOs were operating and hold our courses where there were real case site examples to look at. So it was field-based. So Charlotte and I did this together, and she mentored me. I knew nothing about impact assessment. I was more of a renewable energy guy. So she mentored me and she brought me into IAIA.

My first IAIA conference was in The Hague in the Netherlands with Rob Verheem doing a wonderful musical show – a super mentor, somebody who I thought ought to be getting this award. But at any rate, that was the Hague in 2002. And then I’m going to jump ahead. Charlotte and I helped organize the Boston IAIA Conference in 2005, but the big and important part of my life really began in about 2010 — Lone Kørnøv and I helped put together the IAIA climate change special symposia series. Hers was at her university, the University of Aalborg in Denmark, and I worked to organize with Stephen Lintner, also an IAIA Past President and recipient of the award, at the World Bank, to put on this symposium at the Bank. Stephen was very instrumental in helping us get the climate change initiative going.

Gary: I’m interested in that. To take up a couple of points from what you said — what gives you most hope about the future? Is it on the ground action, or do you think it’s going to come down to law, to government policy? Where is that momentum going to come from? Where’s that lead going to be taken?

Wes: Well, Gary, I may have not focused on the detail of your question, but as far as where we are heading, it seems to me that the work of risk analysts, the work of actuaries — the potential for finding solutions now that we have much better baseline information for simulations, for modeling, for scenario building. It’s going to be very hard for the financial institutions to ignore that reality. It’s science-based. So it’s not political, it’s science-based. When that happens, then everyone begins to take notice. If your insurance rates go up, or if you can’t get insurance, then once that happens, and I think it’s going to happen very quickly now — I’m hopeful that it’s going to happen very quickly. Despite the misinformation and disinformation which we’re addressing in our upcoming conference, there is an incredible amount of work going on. There’s like 16 institutions that I’ve looked at that are doing great work and really focusing down on solutions. So I see that as very promising.

I do think that government institutions, the UN, have much more difficulty translating factual scientific information down to the ordinary folks. Forgive me for just rambling, but for me, the important areas of focus are (1) youth, (2) all of us who have short attention spans, and (3) those of us in that group of four million folks who live on seven dollars a day and folks going paycheck to paycheck. They’ve got other things to worry about. How do we reach them? What’s the way to reach them?

One of our recipients of the IAIA Global Award way back – it was 2015 — Mathis Wackernagel received the Global Award for something called the ecological footprint. And if you just go to your browser and hit ecological footprint, up comes this animation questionnaire that gives you your footprint. It takes only a few minutes. And so folks like me with a short attention span can do this and get a feeling for how many Earths it would take to support me. If all eight billion folks on the planet were me, it looks like it would take the resources of 4.2 Earths to support somebody with my lifestyle. So that raises all kinds of questions about how do we do that? What’s the solution? And in very simple terms, that ecological footprint gets at it. High schoolers, junior high schoolers, and folks like us could take it – I believe it’s a really incredible little tool. It’s animated, it’s fun, and what you end up with is this score that shows you, well, if I have a small house or if I have a house with no running water, what is my footprint going to look like. So that’s storytelling at its best.

There are all sorts of groups now working on climate change mitigation. I think mitigation is much more important to us than adaptation. We’ve got to do the mitigating, and we’ve got to regenerate. We’ve got to actually bring ourselves back into what the Earth systems folks are saying are safe operating space.

Gary: So let’s jump to one final question, because we are short on time and I’m going to pin you. So you’ve got those various solutions and recommendations. What would be your one message to that high schooler coming out now, looking at our world, looking at the possibilities, looking at impact assessment? What would be your message to that person?

Wes: When I was a youth, we didn’t have NEPA. So it was a push, and the push came from the youth, and the public listened. We’re in a moment where things require significant hope. But it’s amazing — the brains of young folks — many are very well aware of these issues and they want solutions, and a combination of bringing science to the front, making sure that it is foremost in everyone’s minds and can push back against misinformation, disinformation — it can be done. We did it with NEPA. So it’s a time to mobilize. And I look at this association as full of people with hope. So it’s very exciting to belong to this association.

Gary: Well, Wes, I think that that’s a very fitting conclusion to it. I appreciate the work and the energy that you bring to it, as well. I think that’s been most apparent. In the three years I’ve been in this role, the energy that you bring to these issues is terrific. So I am delighted that you’ve recieved this award this year. I look forward to continuing these conversations and actions going forward. So thank you again and congratulations.

Wes: We are really lucky to have you, Gary. You’re educating us as well. And you have stepped into this role and become someone who knows impact assessment intimately.

Gary: Thanks very much.