Joseph Merz is a New Zealand-born artist and naturalist. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the Merz Institute, a global research organisation tackling ecological overshoot and its symptoms like climate change. He is the lead author of the paper “World Scientists’ Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot”, which has drawn significant international attention for its call to address the behavioural roots of environmental decline. Joseph is regularly invited to speak, lecture and present to organisations, universities and governments around the world. He also serves as an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Global EverGreening Alliance and advises several NGOs on behavioural strategy.

The nature of his work within the institute takes a heavy toll. “It’s like having a front row seat to the predictable yet irreversible destruction of everything you know and love. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” Joseph describes his art as an outlet for this grief—a way of celebrating the fluid and dynamic outputs of the evolutionary processes that give us this temporal world we inhabit. The grandson of a pioneering Dutch scientist, and the great-grandson of a renowned Dutch illustrator, Joseph has forged a distinct path—a consilience of the two influences.

Joseph lives in New Zealand (Aotearoa) with his wife and their four children on her ancestral Kahungunu lands.