By Peri Dworatzek
IEFLL Partnership Coordinator
PhD Student at York University
November 2025
Katie Linden, previously known as Katie Kish, is an ecological economist and community economic development assistant professor at the University of Cape Breton (CBU) in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Before receiving a tenure-track professorship at CBU, Katie was working with the Ecological Footprint Initiative (EFI) at York University and spearheaded the grant application for the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab.
Starting her academic journey at York University, Katie received a Bachelor of Environmental Studies and then Master’s in Environmental Studies in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. During her master’s degree, Katie worked with Professor Martin Bunch and became an avid thinker of complex systems theory. Eventually, Katie went on to complete a PhD at the University of Waterloo in Social and Ecological Sustainability. Katie then moved from Southern Ontario to take a post-doctoral fellowship with the Economics for the Anthropocene project at McGill University in Montreal.
After completing the post-doctoral position, Katie came full circle back to York University as a Senior Researcher at EFI. Coinciding with Katie’s return to York University, was the beginning of the production of the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts at York University after being transferred from the Global Footprint Network.
This created an opportunity for a knowledge synthesis grant to assess how different people across Canada would want to use ecological footprint and biocapacity. Sticking to the social side of this question, Katie found there was a desire for footprint metrics to be used at the community level to improve social integration in communities. Additionally, she found research gaps about the use of qualitative methods in footprint analysis and questions arising regarding how equity, local knowledge, and decolonization are included in footprint research. Katie and others at EFI believed that the best way to answer these research gaps, along with others, was to train the next generation of sustainability researchers. From here the comprehensive footprint training program in EFI at York University began, eventually leading to the IEFLL project that has a main focus of training graduate students in footprint informatics.
While at EFI, Katie also supervised undergraduate students as research assistants to advance the communication of ecological footprint and biocapacity data. One exceptional student to come out of Katie’s mentorship was Kaitlin Pal, who recently completed her Bachelor’s of Environmental Studies in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and is now pursing a joint Master’s in Environmental Studies and JD at Osgoode Hall Law School. Katie oversaw Kaitlin’s research calculating the biocapacity of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation and analyzed how this data could be used to support environmental stewardship and Indigenous land rights. Eventually, this research was published in the Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development.
Katie is continuing to advance research in data tracking, ecological footprints, and ecological economics while teaching business students at CBU. One research project Katie leads at CBU is bringing data to rural, indigenous, and island communities in Nova Scotia. In this community wellbeing project, Katie and her team are creating a digital data dashboard that allows people across Nova Scotia to access data related to the economy, health, the environment, and society. Katie says one problem facing maritime provinces and especially rural communities is a lack of data availability, which inhibits decision-making at government and community scales. This project aims to fill this data gap to improve governance sovereignty in the communities. Katie’s team is working with the Rural Ontario Institute, an IEFLL organization partner, to create a clone of their Wellbeing dashboard for Cape Breton. Included in Cape Breton Wellbeing Project is ecological footprint and biocapacity data for the communities in Nova Scotia. Propelling the advancement of research downscaling ecological footprint and biocapacity beyond the national level.
Another project advancing data tracking and modeling, but this time related to human health, is the Homeward Bound project, funded by Research Nova Scotia and lead by a multidisciplinary team in Atlantic Canada to understand how people can better age in place. This research is attempting to reduce the amount of long-term care patients, by assessing other intervention methods related to proactively assisting “Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities” (NORCs). Katie is the economic research team lead and is working in close collaboration with Dr. Martin Sers, an expert systems dynamics modeler who is also an IEFLL member as he contributes to the modeling research with Peter Victor in IEFLL. As this project continues, Katie and Martin are answering questions about what interventions have cost savings and social return on investment using macroeconomic modeling. For instance, can an intervention such as installing ramps or setting up a reoccurring farmers market inside of NORCs improve community economic benefits and save costs of health care facilities overtime. As this project advances there are possibilities to include assessments of sustainability such as the ecological footprint of institutional care compared to the ecological footprint of NORCs. Katie hopes this project can help people understand how to empower elderly people to age with dignity in place rather than moving them into long-term care.
Katie is bringing together ecological economist researchers from across Canada for the bi-annual Canadian Society of Ecological Economics conference, being held at CBU on October 7-9, 2026. While Katie advances critical research about the environment, wellbeing, and communities, she also expertly balances caring for her children and dogs, being a new hockey mom for her daughter, and her many hobbies of gaming, power lifting, and crafting.
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