Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai

BioRegional Development Group

Skoll Entrepreneur(s): Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai
Change(s) Addressed: Environmental Sustainability, Institutional Responsibility

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Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai founded BioRegional, based on the shared vision that environmentally sustainable living was possible for them and mainstream society if products and services were developed based on making more efficient use of local renewable and waste resources – in effect creating an economy with a more circular flow of resources and a “metabolism” similar to
that of a local ecosystem.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS OF 2010

In China, we established a local organization in 2009 and have applied the one-planet living approach to a suburb of 20,000 people and a sustainability centre for 100,000 visitors in Guangzhou working with China’s first and third-largest real estate developers. The project has been recognized with a UN award.
We are changing policy and practice in the field of sustainable communities internationally. Korea is using our work as a best-practice case study, Chinese Ministers are reviewing the use of our framework, and we made a significant contribution to the planning policy statement for the U.K. government’s eco-towns, which is now being used as best practice by many governments, including Quebec, Mexico and France.
We are enabling organizations and individuals to use the one-planet living approach to understand and reduce their eco-footprint. Nearly 3,000 people or organizations have created an action plan to reduce their impacts after attending our events or using our online tools.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THEIR WORK:

Bio Regional Development Group. Many of us dream as Dr. Beturi described it.

Of how to live sustainably without having to surrender many of the modern conveniences we've come to depend upon. Bio Regional is proving that this dream can in fact be reality today.

Bio Regional has helped build one of the few zero carbon communities in the world. They have created technologies and practices that use local renewable and waste resources to meet society's needs.

They've proven it's possible for all people to live comfortably, using only their fair share of the earth's resources. What they call one planet living. Due in large part to Bio Regional's work the UK government has adopted a zero carbon target for new homes by 2016. Ladies and gentlemen, Sue Riddleston and Pooran Desai.

Well, thank you so much on behalf of Pooran and all of us at BioRegional. This award is going to make a fantastic difference to us and enable us to to expand our work internationally. We've heard today from Dr. Pachauri how much we need to do something about climate change. We all know this; we all know we need to reduce our ecological footprints. If everyone in the world lived like we do in Europe, then we'd need three planets to support us. We need to live within our fair share of the resources of our one planet. But what we found is that if you tell people they need to reduce their footprint by two-thirds the carbon emissions by ninety percent then they think this is too difficult. They think, oh, I'm going to have to and live in a tepee and give up everything, I just can't take that cut in my quality of my life.

What we found if you show them what it's like in a real life setting, and people can see that it's actually attractive, actually even better, then they're more willing to make the change and, as Sally says we found that this makes the difference, not just for individuals, but for policy makers and the industry.

So the Skoll Award will support us to where we see in China and Africa on real life one planet communities. Sharing knowledge with projects from the UK to North America, these will show that one planet living is attractive and affordable. And we'll bring these stories to Copenhagen and to other policy makers and make the tools available on the web so that anyone can write up there own one planet plan.

What I really love about this work is the spirit of international cooperation.
This idea of joining hands around the world to show that this is what our future could be like.

Thank you very much.

Skoll Foundation

BioRegional Development Group

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Skoll awardees Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai win international award

BioRegional Launches One Planet Vision

Prepping for Copenhagen

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