E Bichard

Erik Bichard is Professor of Regeneration and Sustainable Development at the University of Salford’s School of the Built Environment. His career has been devoted to the field of sustainable change in urban environments. He has held positions in the public, private, third and now the academic sector. Until June 2007, and for ten years, he was Executive Director of the UK National Centre for Business & Sustainability set up and initially funded by the Co-operative Bank. Since becoming an academic his research has investigated the means to enhance sustainable decision-making in the built environment. This has included extensive work on human behaviour change for the UK Environment Agency, specifically on resident’s motivations to invest in flood protection and energy conservation. More recently his work has focused on valuing sustainable change in deprived areas. This work utilises different approaches such as social return on investment, ecosystem services analysis and life cycle assessment to provide a holistic understanding of the sustainable value of development. Prof. Bichard won the RICS Research Fellowship Award in 2012 for this work which involved case studies in Pittsburgh (USA), Porto Alegre (Brazil) and East Salford (UK). he is currently using this new approach to improve the sustainable performance for a number of developers and housing providers. Recent projects in this field include the valuation of youth support and other social impact programmes for social landlords, the valuation of a sustainable workforce initiative at a demolition project in the City of London, and the valuation of a large development portfolio for a London-based developer. He is a regular contributor to printed media, radio and television and has published academic papers, book chapters and two books including ‘Positively Responsible’, (written with co-author and psychologist Prof. Cary Cooper), and ‘The Coming of Age of the Green Community’ published by Routledge in 2014.