Walter Jehne is an internationally recognised soil microbiologist and innovation strategist. He has immense field and
research experience in soils, grasslands, agriculture and forests at local, national (CSIRO and Science Adviser to
Australia’s National Soil Advocate), international (UN) level.
Walter has a remarkable ability to explain complex science and economic paths forward in easy to understand ways.
This comes in part because he has also worked extensively beyond science. at Federal Government level, leading
transformation in industry and policy. It is this rounded out diversity of experience that has given Walter a unique and
exceptional capacity to devise solutions – turning challenges into opportunities.
His specialisation is the role of soil microbes’ symbiotic processes in the ecology of diseases, plant health, nutrient and
waste cycling, soil pedogenesis and the regeneration of bio-systems. Decades of research have made him expert in plant
root ecology, mycorrhizal fungi, glomalin, and soil carbon formation. He also has world on biology’s enormous
influences in hydrological cycles, weather patterns, regional and global cooling, and cloud formation and rain
Walter’s initial extensive research work was on the roles of these microbial ecologies in forests, agriculture and the
rehydration and regeneration of degraded lands. Recent work this past decade and a half since retirement, with Healthy
Soils Australia and now Regenerate Earth, has focused on commercialising leading bio-innovations. These will urgently
help restore agro-ecosystems and urban agriculture and ecologies so as to help meet our water, food, habitat, carbon