GEMMA JEROME

The director of Building with Nature on the need to put nature at the heart of development, and why we may have to rethink our desire for our own private gardens

- TIM RICHARDSON

Gemma Jerome is perched at the kitchen table in her flat in Stroud, Gloucestershire, wearing a vivid cerise top, and dangly earrings under her crop of red hair. “My interest – and it runs through me like a stick of rock,” she says, “is not the environment but social justice. How do we give people fair and equal access to housing that includes green space?” A chair of her local Labour Party association for two years, Gemma speaks of, “disrupting the market economy around placemaking and development for profit”, by means of the highly successful green infrastructure benchmark she has devised as founder-director of Building with Nature.

This is a voluntary set of guidelines for developers seeking to realise a measurable 10 per cent increase in biodiversity net gain, which is set to become written into law later this year. Its three prongs might be summarised as: wildlife, water and well-being — all of them, and especially the last, being tricky to assess objectively. Which is where the benchmark comes in.