Emma Cutting

Founder and CEO of Heartscapes Inc | Australia

"We need to move past sustainable cities to regenerative ones”. So says Emma Cutting who, for 12 years, suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Eventually Emma discovered that being in nature triggered a drastic improvement in her condition, leading her to establish the Australian organisation Heartscapes.

For the past decade, Heartscapes has led projects that strengthen and deepen urban communities of humans, fauna, flora, and fungi through regeneration and conservation and helps hundreds of thousands of people find new connections to nature.

Their mission is to educate city-dwellers about urban wildlife by engaging people in projects that “joyfully transform barren patches of public land into gardens of buzzing, wriggling beauty”. Its biggest project is the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor, a community-driven, ecology-centred, inner-city wildlife strip that supports native pollinating insects.

Both through her organisation and personally, Emma is dedicated to scaling the power of street gardening, which she believes is an untapped goldmine of positive change. She has helped to create more than 100 street gardens and led two community campaigns against local councils – resulting in a change to municipality-wide policy. Emma has also developed an approach to street gardening that supports both residents and councils, bringing more care into public realm, and has even written a book about her passion that has sold around the world.