Marina Goodyear is Project Manager for Bioregional and works on research, monitoring and writing to help their partners understand how to make their business, new development or city the most sustainable it can be.
Marina’s focus is on sustainable places work with developers and local authorities. With property developers, this involves sustainability action planning for major new urban developments in the UK and Ireland, using extensive contextual analysis for each project. With local authorities, Marina helps to develop better planning policy to create low-resource, low- and zero-carbon districts. This ranges from reviews of existing local plans with an eye on carbon, climate and biodiversity, through to producing evidence and guidance on which entirely new policy can be designed.
Alongside this, Marina has also been part of the team co-ordinating Bioregional’s One Planet Cities project since 2018; writing guidance documents, organising international peer-networking webinars, gathering ecological footprint data for Oxfordshire and identifying indicators to track change, as well as helping design research to understand local authorities’ support needs.
Marina is also involved in some of Bioregional’s sustainable business work, including research into sustainable products and materials (and monitoring sales of these) for our retail client Kingfisher.
In 2016 Marina gained a distinction in MSc Environment & Sustainable Development at UCL. Her thesis explored the role of urban agriculture in making cities more resource-efficient and more socially just. UCL then invited Marina to help put together a £7m research proposal on urban inequalities which was successfully funded by the GCRF.