What Audrey Barucchi’s work reveals about climate literacy, people power, and the limits of technocratic solutions
What if the real challenge is not simply finding better climate solutions, but rebuilding the relationship between people, power, and the living world?
That question sits at the heart of a rich and wide-ranging conversation with Audrey Barucchi, co-founder of People for Nature, on Voices of the New Economy. Her story spans France, China, India, Australia, economics, engineering, climate tech, and biodiversity education — but the thread running through it all is surprisingly consistent: a lifelong connection to nature, and especially to insects.
Audrey’s perspective is refreshing because it refuses the false choice between science and emotion, technology and ecology, systems thinking and everyday action. Instead, she offers something far more grounded: a vision of change built on literacy, agency, humility, and people-powered participation.
A New Economy Needs More Informed People — and More Nature
When asked about her vision for a new economy, Audrey did not start with institutions or markets. She started with people.
For her, a better economy would be one where people are more informed, where democracy is stronger, and where people feel a genuine sense of agency. But just as importantly, it would be an economy that recognises nature’s limits. The current economy, she argues, does not seriously account for boundaries, and that failure is driving us deeper into crisis.
This matters because Audrey is not talking about “nature” as an abstract backdrop to the economy. She is talking about the reality that human systems are embedded within ecological systems. If we continue to ignore that, then no amount of efficiency, innovation, or financial growth will save us from the consequences.
The Winding Path to Systems Change
One of the most compelling parts of Audrey’s story is how non-linear it is.
She grew up in France, moving often because of her father’s career in the French Air Force, but she also carried a strong connection to mountains, weather, mushrooms, and insects. That relationship with the natural world stayed with her, even as her life moved through multiple degrees, different countries, and a long corporate career.
She studied economics, worked in China, completed an MBA in India, and eventually built a professional niche translating complex scientific and engineering ideas for wider audiences. That led her into climate and decarbonisation technology in Australia, where she spent a decade helping communicate the promise of technical solutions.
But over time, she came to a difficult realisation: the issue was not simply that we lacked solutions. The deeper problem was systemic. Engineers and technical experts might know how to solve one piece of the puzzle, but often without understanding the wider systems within which those solutions sit, they risk creating new problems elsewhere.
This is a crucial insight. Climate and biodiversity breakdown are not just technical problems. They are symptoms of an economic and cultural system that is structurally out of balance.
Why She Walked Away from Climate Tech
Audrey is clear that she is not anti-technology. She likes her washing machine. She appreciates the benefits of modern communications. She is not arguing for a return to some imagined pre-modern simplicity.
What she is questioning is our dependence on technology, and the almost unquestioned faith many people place in it as the primary path out of crisis.
After ten years in the decarbonisation technology sector, she found herself increasingly frustrated. Huge amounts of money, talent, and effort were being directed into climate technologies, yet from her perspective, the sector had failed to make the kind of meaningful dent that the urgency of the crisis demands. What had been captured, she noted, was not carbon — but capital, attention, and human resources.
Her concern is not that technology has no role to play. It is that we have overinvested in technological fixes without adequately confronting the social, ecological, and economic systems driving the crisis in the first place. Climate change cannot be solved through carbon spreadsheets alone. It is bound up with planetary boundaries, biodiversity, social systems, and the way we organise society.
As she puts it, solving one piece of the puzzle while creating a hole somewhere else is not a solution.
People for Nature and the Power of Ordinary Citizens
This is where People for Nature comes in.
Audrey co-founded the organisation with other women who had become frustrated by the limits of both corporate and academic pathways. They wanted to create something that remained connected to science and evidence, but that also trusted the power of ordinary people to act.
That idea of people power is central to the organisation’s philosophy.
Audrey draws inspiration from the fact that major social transformations rarely begin with everyone changing at once. More often, they start with a relatively small number of committed people who begin acting differently and invite others in. For her, the challenge is not to wait for the perfect top-down solution, but to ask: how do we help everyday people feel informed, capable, and connected enough to take meaningful action where they are?
People for Nature is built around that question. Their theory of change is simple but powerful: if people are more informed, and if they feel a stronger sense of agency, they are more likely to act.
That action, importantly, is not imagined as one grand gesture. It is distributed, local, and cumulative.
Citizen Conservation and Everyday Ecological Repair
People for Nature is also working to expand what conservation means.
Audrey argues that conservation is too often framed as something that happens somewhere else — in a national park, by experts, through formal institutions. She wants to shift that. Conservation, in her view, can also happen in a backyard, through planting native species, removing weeds, avoiding pesticides, or simply paying closer attention to what lives around us.
This is what she calls a citizen conservation approach.
It is rooted in the belief that everyday people can contribute to biodiversity outcomes without needing to become full-time experts. Small actions matter, not because they are sufficient on their own, but because they help rebuild the social and ecological fabric that more durable change depends on.
The organisation also links this with citizen science. Their koala scat monitoring work, for example, helps build knowledge about koala populations while also engaging people in the practical realities of ecological decline. Audrey is honest that the picture for koalas is not good, but that shared understanding is itself part of what helps communities act.
A Crisis of Wisdom, Not Just a Crisis of Systems
One of the most profound ideas Audrey offers is that what we are facing is not only a crisis of technology or policy, but a crisis of wisdom.
By wisdom, she does not mean elite expertise. She means something more ordinary and more ancient: our capacity to observe, to pay attention, to be in relationship with place, to notice clouds, insects, seasons, and patterns of life. These forms of knowing have not disappeared, but they have often been pushed aside by systems that reward speed, extraction, and abstraction.
Audrey suggests that children often still carry this creativity and connection more naturally. Adults, by contrast, may suppress it through shame, busyness, and narrow ideas about what counts as valuable knowledge.
The work, then, is not just to tell people what to do. It is to create conditions where they can recover forms of knowing and relating that are already inside them.
This is one reason why Audrey often returns to insects. They are not just a childhood interest. They are a portal into a different way of seeing the world — one that values adaptation, interdependence, patience, and wonder.
