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“Alex Steffen, a designing optimist, lays out the blueprint for a successful century.” 

-The New York Times

Alex Steffen is an award-winning futurist, writer and public speaker with a long track record of breakthrough work in social innovation, sustainability, design and futurism.

Beginning with his work as an environmental journalist reporting from four continents in 1990s, Steffen has been at the forefront of futurism and planetary thinking for over two decades.

From 2003-2010, Steffen helmed the pioneering website Worldchanging.com. Under his leadership, the solutions-based magazine became the second-largest sustainability site on the planet. Steffen’s books Worldchanging: A user’s guide for the 21st century and Worldchanging 2.0 were international best-sellers and critical hits. Al Gore hailed the book in his foreword, saying that it presented, “a picture of a future that is not dark or catastrophic, but one that is full of hope and within our grasp."

His work on cities and urbanization has been widely acclaimed and proven extremely influential. Steffen was one of the first prominent voices arguing that sustainable cities were critical to a sustainable future, a major theme of his magazine Steelhead from 1996-98. He has continued exploring the nature of bright green urbanism throughout his career, putting forward new ideas in essays, keynote lectures and most recently in his 2012 booklet, Carbon Zero: Imagining cities that can save the planet. Denis Hayes, co-founder of Earth Day and president of the Bullitt Foundation says “Alex Steffen may be the world's boldest, most innovative thinker about future cities."

Steffen holds a formidable reputation as a consultant. He has advised scores of the world’s most forward-looking institutions, including major philanthropic foundations, international environmental NGOs, large investment funds, humanitarian design groups, governments and technology companies. In 2013-2014, Steffen was Planetary Futurist-in-Residence at the design and innovation company IDEO, helping the company and its clients discover new ways to respond to our rapidly changing times with more foresighted design and strategy.

Steffen shares many of his ideas on stage as a public speaker. He’s given over 500 talks in the last ten years. He is one of the few people who's been invited to speak twice at the TED conference. He has also spoken at nearly every major conference on the "ideas circuit" (some several times—like SxSW Interactive, which he has keynoted three times), as well as at many of the world's most prestigious institutions of learning (including Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, MIT, Caltech, the London School of Economics and the Royal Geographical Society). The conference SxSW labelled him “the thinking person’s futurist.”

He’s been the subject of major media as diverse as a CNN documentary, a New York Times profile, a Today show appearance and a Sun Magazine cover interview... as well as at least 800 other media stories covering his work. His own commentary has appeared (among other places) in the Harvard Business Review, Wired, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Marketplace and CNN Global, as well as a variety of NPR shows. The winner of two Webby Awards, the Utne Independent Press Award and a Green Prize for his work at Worldchanging, Steffen has also been named to many lists, including "Innovator to Watch in 2012" by Smithsonian magazine, the GOOD 100 list of global innovation leaders and the New York Times Magazine’s “6 Ecological Innovators.” He was recently appointed a senior fellow at the Design Futures Council.

Alex Steffen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.