François Soulard

François Soulard is the Research Manager for the new “Census of Environment” program at Statistics Canada (announced in the Canadian Federal Budget in April 2021). François has been involved in the field of environmental statistics for 25 years, with a specific focus on the development of environmental accounts and the integration of Earth observation data. As Chief of the R&D section for the environmental statistics program at StatCan, François has coordinated several large scale projects including the Canada-China Environmental Accounting cooperation program (2005-2010), StatCan’s contribution to the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators for Water (2004-2008), the Canadian government inter-departmental “Measuring Ecosystem Goods and Services” project (2011-13), and is responsible for Statistics Canada’s flagship publication “Human Activity and the Environment”. François regularly provides international training and cooperation on the development and applications of the United Nation’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), namely on ecosystem, land, water, urban and ocean accounts.