Jennifer Rae Pierce

Jennifer Rae Pierce heads Urban Biodiversity Hub’s Partnerships & Engagement team and is a Steering Committee member. She is a political ecologist and urban biodiversity planner. She is currently working on her PhD at the University of British Columbia on the topic of engagement in urban biodiversity planning. She has an architecture degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University and a Master’s in Environmental Science and Policy from Central European University.

She produced a toolkit on mainstreaming biodiversity and ecosystem services across local governments for ICLEI called the Nature of Mainstreaming. Her research includes international comparative work on urban biodiversity plans as well as onsite research on biodiversity practices in Curitiba, Brazil, and Jerusalem, Israel. She taught environmental philosophy and planning at CEPT University. She has worked with the City of Vancouver as a Greenest City Scholar to develop assessments and recommendations on urban beavers and Canada geese, and also partnered with BCIT to measure the ecological footprint of the city.