Dr. Ridoutt is a Principal Research Scientist with The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency. He has a BSc in Forest Science and a PhD in plant physiology from the University of Melbourne. Dr. Ridoutt started his career as a forest scientist, before specialising in the assessment of carbon and water footprints. His expertise is in life cycle sustainability assessment, which is applied to agricultural production, food systems and sustainable diets. Dr. Ridoutt is actively involved in the development of improved calculation methods for sustainability assessment which can be used as a reliable basis for sustainability improvement. He is a pioneer in the field of water footprinting assessment and is currently leading a task group of the United Nations Environment Programme and the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (UNEP-SETAC) Life Cycle Initiative on footprint indicators. He is also engaged in the international harmonization of sustainability assessment and reporting aimed at reducing costs and risks for business and improving the quality of environmental declarations and labels directed toward the public. In this regard, he is the Australian delegate to several International Organization for Standardization (ISO) working groups.

Dr. Ridoutt seeks to provide science-based evidence to inform the debate about sustainable food systems and sustainable diets. A particular focus has been the livestock industry and the role of livestock products in a sustainable food system. He published the first Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based water footprint in the dairy sector and has demonstrated that many livestock products can be produced with minimal potential to contribute to freshwater scarcity, dispelling the myth that the water footprints of animal products are necessarily larger than the water footprints of crop products with equivalent nutritional value. Overall, he has published about 60 papers in scientific journals. His most recent publication focuses on the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions of the Australian diet.