In February 2025, Oxford Nature Conversations brought together 15 residents to collaboratively envision a future where both people and nature can thrive in Oxford. Over the course of four deliberative workshop days, participants engaged in structured discussions, expert presentations, and collaborative exercises to explore environmental challenges and opportunities in the city.
This inclusive process resulted in a shared vision and a set of actionable recommendations reflecting the community’s collective knowledge and priorities.
Output association: LCNR supported
Unilateral value chain policies have recently emerged as a key strategy of international land use governance. They’re part of a broader trend towards trade-based environmental policies, from corporate due diligence to sustainability certification and trade moratoria, that has been critiqued for reinforcing inequities in global trade. Such critique has been heightened by the current rise of unilateralism, whereby states impose environmental rules on imported commodities. Debates have ensued over the political legitimacy of unilateralism, the unequal distribution of its socio-economic impacts, and the need to safeguard local producers and communities. This paper informs these debates by developing and applying a framework for monitoring equity across scales and phases of the policy process. The framework is applied to the 2023 EU Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR), which aims to stop EU imports of commodities linked to deforestation. We find that EUDR policy references equity as a desired outcome, but excludes affected actors from the design process. Drawing on the case of cocoa in Ghana, we identify diverse potential impacts on smallholder farmers and economies. Opportunities for the EUDR to improve equity include embedding non-EU stakeholders in international decision-making processes, enhanced and equitable partnerships with producing countries and major investments in farmer support. The paper concludes by providing an equity checklist and agenda for monitoring progress, adaptable to a wide range of unilateral and trade-based policies.
From greening to wellbeing: Spatial and social-economic disparities in School outdoor greenness and the impact on mental wellbeing and school attendance in children and adolescents.
Wendee gave a presentation to the Healthy Ecosystem Restoration in Oxfordshire (HERO) Network on 9/4/2025 about her research.
Authors: Alison Smith, Natalie Duffus, Wenjing (Wendee) Zhang.
Changes proposed to England’s planning system are intended to support increased housebuilding and economic growth. In December 2024, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) invited comments on a working paper on development and nature recovery (that this was not a formal public consultation). LCNR submitted its response in February 2025. In it, LCNR welcomed the move to a more strategic approach, but also identifed some significant areas of concern including the risks to natural systems, integration with other policies and weakened protections for habitats and species. LCNR’s main recommendation is that environmental issues must be taken into account earlier in the planning process. There should be a focus on the location and design of new developments, to ensure that they are built around existing natural species and habitats while avoiding damage to those assets. Developers should work with local partners and citizens to bring in their knowledge, views and values, to deliver high quality developments that support flourishing local communities and economies.
Artisanal and small-scale gold mining at the forest-farm nexus remains a contentious issue due to the diversity of actors and competing interests surrounding it. Using the actor-centered power (ACP) approach, it has been theorized that actors leverage power resources, combining coercion, (dis-)incentives, and dominant information, to influence less powerful actors to act against their preferred interests.
Martha Crockatt and Mattia Troiano have been exploring equity of urban greenspace in Oxford communities. Here they present findings from their interdisciplinary research, which has used a wide range of methods to explore the implications of adopting a recognitional equity approach when thinking about access to greenspace and participation in its governance, culminating in a community workshop and academic paper (in prep).
Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere’s most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy. However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties. This situation arises, in part, from a lack of understanding about how and why the functional properties of tropical forest canopies vary geographically4. Here, by combining field-collected data from more than 1,800 vegetation plots and tree traits with satellite remote-sensing, terrain, climate and soil data, we predict variation across 13 morphological, structural and chemical functional traits of trees, and use this to compute and map the functional diversity of tropical forests. Our findings reveal that the tropical Americas, Africa and Asia tend to occupy different portions of the total functional trait space available across tropical forests. Tropical American forests are predicted to have 40% greater functional richness than tropical African and Asian forests. Meanwhile, African forests have the highest functional divergence—32% and 7% higher than that of tropical American and Asian forests, respectively. An uncertainty analysis highlights priority regions for further data collection, which would refine and improve these maps. Our predictions represent a ground-based and remotely enabled global analysis of how and why the functional traits of tropical forest canopies vary across space.
In this video, we dive deep into how human behavioral science can be a game-changer in conservation efforts. Many of the most pressing environmental and conservation issues stem from human actions, but addressing these problems requires more than just awareness campaigns. Traditional methods like educating the public often fail to create lasting change. To make real progress in nature recovery, biodiversity, and environmental conservation, we need to understand and influence human behavior at a deeper level. In this insightful talk, we debunk common myths around changing environmental behaviors and explore how human social wiring can be harnessed to drive meaningful, scalable changes. We also cover the most effective communication strategies derived from behavioral science that can be used to inspire real-world impact. Whether you’re an academic, work in an NGO, or are part of government organizations dedicated to environmental recovery, this video will give you powerful tools and insights to help transform how we approach conservation challenges.
There is growing interest in developing generalisable, standardised measurements of biodiversity, in particular to help the business and financial sectors to quantify biodiversity impacts. In their recent paper, Dr Hannah Wauchope and colleagues created a framework to explain how such units are defined in the rapidly growing voluntary biodiversity credits market. In this seminar, Hannah Wauchope will present this framework and use it to discuss the many measurement challenges that are faced in trying to reduce something as complex as biodiversity to a single unit, and what this might mean for biodiversity credit markets.
About the speaker Hannah Wauchope is a Lecturer in Ecology and Conservation at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines how we measure biodiversity and our impacts upon it for policy and practice. Hannah studied zoology and ecology at the University of Queensland (Australia). She worked with the Australian Antarctic Division, before embarking on a PhD at the University of Cambridge to study the effects of protected areas on waterbird populations and related methodologies. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she was an 1851 Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, studying the impact of warming on species in the past (through the Holocene and late Quaternary) as a way of improving understanding of range shifts and help draw generalisations about how other species will move in the future.
This seminar was a part of the NatureFinance@Oxford seminar series, a collaboration between Resilience Planet Finance Lab, Oxford Nature Positive hub, Department of Biology. The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery was a co-host for this seminar. More information on this seminar series: https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/page/naturefinanceoxford-seminar-series
In this video, Andrew Gonzalez explores the critical role of biodiversity science in achieving the targets set by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) for 2030. With growing global efforts to reverse biodiversity loss, urgent and integrated action across all sectors is essential to bend the biodiversity curve. However, the implementation of the GBF is currently hindered by a lack of comprehensive and accurate data on biodiversity change. Our ability to track and understand biodiversity loss remains geographically patchy and uncertain. In this video, we introduce a detection and attribution framework for biodiversity change, which is crucial for guiding effective conservation and recovery actions. We also highlight the importance of science in supporting key targets, such as ecological connectivity and the establishment of protected areas. Furthermore, we propose the creation of a Global Biodiversity Observing System (GBiOS) to address significant knowledge gaps and enhance global biodiversity monitoring. This system will strengthen our ability to detect and assess biodiversity changes over time and bridge the gap between science and policy. Join us as we delve into innovative approaches that will support biodiversity conservation efforts and help policymakers take decisive action to meet the global biodiversity goals for 2030.