Uygar Özesmi is an environmental scientist, serial social entrepreneur and advocate for economic systems change, working to build a society and economy in sympoiesis with the planet.
He holds a BSc in Geological Engineering from Middle East Technical University, an MS in Environmental Science from Ohio State University as a Fulbright Scholar and a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Conservation Biology with a minor in Development and Social Change as a MacArthur Scholar. In 2016, he was elected an Ashoka Senior Fellow, a distinction awarded to leading social entrepreneurs whose ideas have the potential to transform entire systems. He was recognised for pioneering the prosumer economy, a cyclical alternative to extractive, consumption-driven economic models.
Özesmi brought the prosumer economy to life through Good4Trust.org, an online platform for economic exchange that has grown into an ecosystem of thousands of enterprises and tens of thousands of participants, supported by its own complementary currency. He chairs the board of the Prosumer Economy Society (Türetim), which stewards the Next Economies Forum in partnership with the Club of Rome, Earth4All and other organisations working on economic systems transformation. He is also an Associate Post-Growth Fellow and co-founded the Armaş Foundation with his wife and friends, a retreat and organic farm hosting young people, artists and change agents.
Trained as a systems ecologist, Özesmi has spent more than 35 years founding organisations, leading institutions and developing approaches to create more sustainable economic and social systems. Özesmi is co-founder of Complexys.ai, which helps organisations make better strategic decisions in complex systems by combining stakeholder insight with AI-assisted systems modelling to simulate how change spreads through a system and identify high-impact intervention points.
He founded the Environmental Engineering Department at Erciyes University and KusBank.org, Turkey’s first citizen science platform. He was founding board chair of Doğa Derneği, the Turkish partner of BirdLife International, served as Environmental Specialist at the United Nations Development Programme and was Executive Director of the TEMA Foundation, Greenpeace Mediterranean and Change.org Turkey. He has also served on the boards of CIVICUS and Ashoka.
An Adjunct Assistant Professor at Kadir Has University, where he teaches Sustainable Energy and Ecological Economics, Özesmi has published more than 100 scientific papers, written three books, contributes a regular column to Ekonomi Gazetesi and hosts a daily programme on Apaçık Radyo.
