The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

Chris Evans has lived and worked in Nepal since 1985, co-founding the Jajarkot Permaculture Project, which successfully spread new ideas in line with existing cultural traditions. Chris started his career as a VSO volunteer in a community forestry programme in Nepal after graduating in Forestry in the UK.

Based in the remote western district of Jajarkot, he quickly realised the shortfalls of international development and so in 1988, when he came across the concept of Permaculture, he embarked on an ambitious alternative. Starting with a local friend, £500 and an acre of degraded farmland in the district centre of Jajarkot he founded a demonstration and training centre which grew organically into the Jajarkot Permaculture Programme (JPP), a diverse array of projects spanning 4 districts, 65 villages, 8 resource centres (working farms), 120 staff and volunteers, and a membership of 12,000 farmers.

He stayed with the JPP until 2001 when he started to work with community groups which were spawned from the original programme. In 2002 he started work with the UK charity Appropriate Technology Asia directing their Nepal programmes, working in the district of Humla, one of the remotest and most challenging areas of the country. He left ATA in 2008 and now works independently with a new local, grass roots NGO, the Himalayan Permaculture Centre, in Nepal, and a Permaculture Design and Education consultancy, Designed Visions, in UK where he is based in Herefordshire. Beside his grass-roots experience in Nepal, Chris has taught permaculture in UK, India, U.S.A. and Mexico. He is also a diploma tutor and takes on apprentices studying towards their diploma in UK.