William W. L. Cheung

Dr. William (Wai Lung) Cheung is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Ocean Sustainability and Global Change, and the Director of the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, the University of British Columbia (UBC).

He is an international leader in developing and using scenarios and models of biodiversity and ecosystem services to understand the responses and vulnerabilities of marine human-natural systems to global change. His work addresses policy-relevant research questions and cut across multiple disciplines, from oceanography to ecology, economics and social sciences, and range from local to global scales.

William is also actively involved in international and regional initiatives that bridge science and policy. He was a Coordinating Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in the Changing Climate, Lead Author in the Working Group II of the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, and is now a member of the Core Writing Team for the Synthesis Report in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment. He is also a member of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Scenarios and Models Task Force and a Lead Author of IPBES Global Assessment and Coordinating Lead Author of the IPBES Methodological Assessment on Scenarios and Models. He serves as Associate Editor for Global Change Biology and Ecological Society of America’s Frontier in Ecology and the Environment.