Richard Douthwaite

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Richard Douthwaite was born in Yorkshire, UK in 1942 and studied at Leeds and Essex universities. He worked as a government economist in the West Indies before moving to Ireland to become an economist and writer with a special interest in climate and energy issues and local economic development. He is co-founder of Feasta: The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, an Irish based economic think tank. He is a council member of Comhar, the Irish government's national sustainability council and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He lives in Westport, Co. Mayo.

In the 1994 European Parliament election he stood unsuccessfully as the Green Party candidate for the Connacht-Ulster constituency.

He is a visiting lecturer at the University of Plymouth and contributes the economic content to the Master’s course in Theology and the Environment at Dalgan Park, Navan, . He has contributed lectures to courses at four parts of the National University of Ireland (Dublin, Maynooth, Cork and Galway) and at the universities of London (Goldsmiths and LSE), Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Leicester, Newcastle, Manchester, Uppsala, Malardalen, Stockholm (KTH) and Budapest.

Douthwaite's first book, "The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet" was published in 1992 and was re-issued in an extended and up-dated second edition in 1999. It explores why the present economic system is dependent on economic growth and the effects that the resulting pursuit of growth has had on the environment and society. His other major book, "Short Circuit" (1996) gives dozens of examples of currency, banking, energy and food production systems which communities can use to make themselves less dependent on an increasingly unstable world economy.

In "The Ecology of Money", published in 1999, he calls for different currencies for different purposes and for changes in the way money is put into circulation so that a stable, sustainable economy can be achieved. In 2003 he edited "Before the Wells Run Dry", a study of the transition to renewable energy in the light of climate change and oil and gas depletion and in 2004 "To Catch the Wind", a report on how communities can invest in wind energy.

He acted as economic adviser to the Global Commons Institute (London) from 1993 to 2005 during which time GCI developed the Contraction and Convergence approach to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions which has now been backed by many countries. He has since helped Feasta devise the Cap and Share framework for emissions reduction which may be adopted by the Irish government.