Chris Ryan is Professor and Director of the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne. He was foundation professor of Design and Sustainability at RMIT University from 1996-2004 and founding Director of the ARC National Centre for Environmental Design 1989-1997.

His early community work included the establishment of networks for alternative communities and alternative technology in the UK and the creation of CERES in Brunswick in 1979. CERES was a community take-over of waste land for the purpose of researching and creating new socially and environmentally sustainable jobs, focused on the production of energy, food, housing, organic compost (and worms) and new educational curricula.

Chris was professor and then Director of the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund university, Sweden 1997-2002. In  2002 he was consultant to the UN Environment Program coordinating and writing the Global Progress Report on Sustainable Consumption for the Johannesburg UN world summit in 2002.

He  is currently one of the leaders of an ARC linkage project to model food futures for Australia and he directs the national Visions and Pathways 2040 project to understand potential futures for Australian Cities if they achieve 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

He is joint-director of the International Eco-Acupuncture project (EcoA) with Dr Michael Trudgeon. EcoA takes a ‘distributed transformation’ approach to achieving sustainable cities, towns and suburbs, based on co-designing resilient futures and identifying many small interventions to change the dynamics of urban life.

EcoA is a program to catalyse (rapid) urban transformation exploring the potential for localised networked systems of energy, water, food, transport, waste and built infrastructure. The program has been developed and refined over five years of work in Melbourne and a number of Victorian towns and, over the last few years, in various European cities.