Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He currently holds a Professorial Fellowship on Prosperity and Sustainability in the Green Economy (PASSAGE) also funded by the ESRC. In addition to this Tim is an award-winning playwright with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC.
Tim joined the University of Surrey in 1995 under a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship on the thermodynamics of clean technology, after five years as Senior Researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute. In April 2000, he was appointed as Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey, the first such chair to be created in the UK. Between January 2003 and April 2005, Tim held a research fellowship on the social psychology of sustainable consumption, supported by the ESRC's Sustainable Technologies Programme. His monograph Motivating Sustainable Consumption (2005) drawing on research from that period is still widely cited in both academic and policy circles and was influential in framing the Changing Behaviours chapter in the 2005 UK Sustainable Development Strategy.
During his time at the Stockholm Environment Institute, he pioneered the concept of preventative environmental management outlined in his 1996 book Material Concerns: pollution profit and quality of life. In 1996 he co-authored (with Nic Marks) the first Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare for the UK and has continued to work closely with the New Economics Foundation and others on measures of sustainable wellbeing at national and regional level.
During the last decade, he has led numerous research and policy initiatives on sustainable consumption and production in the UK and abroad. From June 2004 to March 2006, he was the sole academic representative on the UK Sustainable Consumption Round Table and co-authored their influential report I will if you will. In 2006 Tim published the Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Consumption. He led the team which developed the Surrey Environmental Lifestyle Mapping (SELMA) model used to estimate the UK's 'carbon footprint' for the Carbon Trust. He is a co-author of the WorldWatch Institute's influential State of the World 2008 on sustainable economies. From 2006 to 2009, he led the SDC’s Redefining Prosperity programme and authored the controversial report, later published by Earthscan as Prosperity without Growth: economics for a finite planet.