- Indonesian economist and entrepreneur Denica Riadini-Flesch won UCLA’s 2025 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award for creating a “farm-to-closet” supply chain that regenerates land, revives traditional craft, and empowers rural women through her social enterprise, SukkhaCitta.
- Her model replaces factory production with smallholder cotton farms and artisan workshops across Indonesia, restoring more than 120 acres of land, cutting pollution from synthetic dyes, and raising women’s incomes by 60%, while teaching ecological literacy and entrepreneurship through Rumah SukkhaCitta schools.
- Runner-up Anthony Waddle of Macquarie University is reviving Australia’s endangered green and golden bell frog, pioneering habitat-based solutions such as “frog saunas,” vaccination trials, and genetic resistance research to counter the deadly chytrid fungus threatening amphibians worldwide.
- Runner-up Seema Lokhandwala, founder of the Elephant Acoustics Project, uses low-frequency sensors to detect elephants near villages in Northeast India, giving communities advance warnings that prevent deadly encounters and foster coexistence between people and wildlife.
In a world defined by extraction, Denica Riadini-Flesch is proving that creation can heal instead. The Indonesian economist-turned-entrepreneur has won UCLA’s 2025 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award for building a “farm-to-closet” supply chain—a system that regenerates land, restores heritage craft, and empowers rural women.
Riadini-Flesch founded SukkhaCitta after an encounter that reshaped her view of progress. As a young economist from Jakarta, she once equated development with growth—an upward line without end. That illusion unraveled when she visited a village where women labored for weeks over textiles only to earn a few dollars, their skin and lungs scarred by synthetic dyes.
“It burns my hands, my eyes, my lungs,” one woman told her. The remark revealed what Riadini-Flesch calls “the true cost of convenience.”
SukkhaCitta set out to invert that logic. Instead of sprawling factories, production takes place in courtyards and small farms across Java, Bali, Flores, and West Timor. Cotton is grown on mixed plots that regenerate the soil; dyes come from indigo and mahogany leaves; fabrics are woven on handlooms. The enterprise has restored more than 120 acres of degraded land, kept five million liters of toxic dye wastewater out of rivers, and raised women’s incomes by 60 percent on average.
The environmental benefits are measurable, but the social ones may matter more. Through decentralized Rumah SukkhaCitta schools, women learn ecological literacy, entrepreneurship, and heritage techniques side by side. Younger generations—once drawn to city sweatshops—are returning home to earn dignified incomes.
“Artisans and farmers are the missing link to solving the climate crisis,” Riadini-Flesch said. “When rural artisans lead, we lay the blueprint for a regenerative future.”
Her husband and co-founder, Bertram Flesch, accepted the award in Los Angeles on her behalf; Riadini-Flesch, seven months pregnant, joined remotely from Indonesia. He spoke of the Indigenous concept of tumpang sari—a polyculture in which cotton grows beside twenty other crops, each supporting the next.
“We’ve made a business case for regeneration,” he said. “It shows you can run a supply chain that restores the environment instead of depleting it.”
That model has drawn interest beyond fashion. Companies in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals are seeking to adapt its principles. What began as a modest social enterprise is becoming a template for how industry can function more like an ecosystem: cyclical, inclusive, and resilient.
Philanthropist Tony Pritzker, who founded the award in 2017, called Riadini-Flesch “a standout example of a social entrepreneur who is leveraging her commitment to environmental sustainability to both preserve Indonesian traditions and create a viable business model.”
In remarks via Zoom, Riadini-Flesch reflected on her unlikely path from academia to regenerative fashion.
“I am literally the least fashionable person you’ll ever meet,” she joked. “But I learned from the women in these villages that even in dark times we can choose to bring light.”
Her aim is to regenerate 2.5 million acres of land and create sustainable livelihoods for 10,000 women by 2050. For her, the metric of success is not wealth but dignity.
Runners-up
Anthony Waddle, a Schmidt Science Fellow at Macquarie University, pursues a different kind of regeneration—of species rather than soil. His focus is the green and golden bell frog, once nearly extinct in eastern Australia after being ravaged by the chytrid fungus, a pathogen that has wiped out more amphibians than any other disease.
Waddle’s work blends practicality and audacity. He has tested vaccinations, refined captive-breeding programs, and built “frog saunas”—brick-lined shelters that give amphibians warm microclimates hostile to the fungus. Survival rates have doubled and breeding activity has surged. He is now exploring genetic resistance through synthetic biology, arguing that conservation must evolve as fast as the threats it confronts. “A major barrier in my area is the presence of defeatist attitudes,” he wrote. “I believe we can solve this.”
Beyond frogs, Waddle is reshaping how conservation treats disease—less as an inevitability than as a solvable engineering challenge. His optimism, grounded in data, has helped revive faith in a field that had begun to lose it.
Seema Lokhandwala, founder of the Elephant Acoustics Project, uses listening itself as a conservation tool. In India’s northeastern states, where elephant migration routes slice through farms and villages, her low-frequency sensors detect the rumbling calls of approaching herds and alert communities before conflict occurs. Villagers can then clear paths or deter elephants with safe sound cues, sparing both lives and crops.
Her network has already reduced fatalities near Kaziranga National Park and allowed field teams to monitor elephants non-invasively through GPS tracking. Lokhandwala pairs her technological skill with deep local engagement, training residents to maintain the devices and map elephant routes. In a country where hundreds die annually in human-wildlife clashes, her work offers a humane and scalable solution rooted in coexistence.
“Expanding farms, economic pressures, and the relentless pace of globalization are eroding the tolerance that has allowed people and elephants to live side by side,” she wrote. “This realization spurred me to work toward protecting the very relationship between humans and elephants—the invisible bond that holds coexistence together.”
The Prize
Now in its ninth year, the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award has become one of the most prominent honors for innovators under 40. It carries a $100,000 prize and global visibility at a formative stage of a career. The two runners-up this year each received an additional $10,000, a gesture Pritzker announced on the spot.
“All three of you are doing remarkable things and all three of you deserve recognition,” Pritzker said at the ceremony.
The award is distinctive less for its size than for its ethos. It spotlights early-career leaders who combine rigorous science with moral imagination—those who refuse to accept ecological collapse as destiny. The 2025 selection panel included UCLA deans, civic officials, and climate-finance leaders.
Speaking at the ceremony, Pritzker emphasized education as the root of every finalist’s success: “The instruments you’re using—the sensors for elephants, the tools for measuring soil, the technology to track animals—all come from learning.” Saving the planet “doesn’t happen accidentally,” Pritzker said, “it happens on the ground level, and then it grows.”
That sentiment captured the mood of an evening defined not by competition but by shared purpose. Each finalist embodied a form of applied hope: science that listens, business that heals, and technology that revives what was lost.
For Riadini-Flesch, the award is both recognition and invitation—to expand her experiment in regeneration from villages to industries worldwide.
“We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet,” she said.
“I believe in an economy where growth is measured by how well we repair what’s been broken: soil, rivers, dignity, trust. A future rooted in care. Handcrafted by many hands. Where no one is invisible. And no one is disposable.”
Credits
