Leo Johnson

Leo Johnson is a Visiting Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford University, and the Presenter of the BBC World News programmes World Challenge and One Square Mile. He is the Co-Founder of the strategy advisory firm Sustainable Finance, now part of the PwC group, and a Trustee of the New Economics Foundation. Formerly with the Technical and Environment Department of the IFC, part of the World Bank Group, he is a Judge for the FT Boldness in Business Awards and has commented and written guest columns for the FT and Huffington Post. He is the Co-Founder of the Prix Pictet—a Prize for Photography around sustainability issues for which Kofi Annan is the Patron.

In his new book, Turnaround Challenge (Oxford University Press, 2013), co-authored with Mick Blowfield, Leo asks the question, have we got the rights to optimism? Can capitalism deliver? He moves beyond the rhetoric of extinction to look at the prospects for a next great wave of growth. Three cities of the future emerge as scenarios. The first is Petropolis, the city of fossil fuel driven mass production and consumption. The second is Cyburbia, sensored and censored. The third is the Distributed City, where post-mass technologies, from micro-production to renewable energy, help to construct a built environment in which we are not just resilient but thrive.