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 type: Report
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.
This report, produced by the British Ecological Society brings together 40 academics, including LCNR’s Jed Soleiman, practitioners and farmers across the UK to explore the evidence for Regenerative Agriculture as a solution to delivering for both food and nature.
Equity of access to, and planning of, Urban Green Spaces (UGS) is an area of growing interest in a period in which urban greening is intertwined with equity issues in socially diverse urban centres. While efforts to widen communities’ spatial access to UGS and procedural representation in their planning through more inclusive place-based governance arrangements have been made, little attention has been paid to the recognitional dimension of equity, here understood as recognition of communities’ lived experience of deprivation and historic relations with institutions. This thesis takes an intra- and inter-community comparative approach between three areas of Oxford with low, mid-high and high deprivation levels, and varying types of neighbourhood or regeneration plans.
A free, drop-in family-friendly event led by researchers Martha Crockatt and Mattia Troiano, developed in collaboration with Natasha Summer, a local community champion, and in partnership with the Oxfordshire African Caribbean Multicultural Society. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Festival of Social Science.
Research from Wild Justice shows only 53% of on-site environmental measures legally secured through the development process are actually delivered in reality.
Read the Wild Justice Lost Nature Summary here
This infographic shows the Centre’s achievements for the 2023/2024 reporting year
This is the Centre’s Annual Report for the 2023/2024 reporting year.
This report sets out an expert opinion on how Government should approach the issues of funding and financing nature recovery in England.
The research takes as its starting point the essential importance of nature recovery and the headwinds so far experienced in achieving it. Taking account of the growing expectation that new nature markets will play a leading role in financing nature recovery, it then looks in detail at the risks and opportunities market mechanisms present and the steps the UK Government will need to take to oversee and regulate their use. Subsequent sections consider the essential and ongoing role of the public sector in supporting nature recovery and its under utilised potential to drive change.
Commissioned by the Woodland Trust, the research is intended to draw out key issues for policy makers and to stimulate thinking and debate.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The Nattergal Report on Engagement Best Practice for Landscape-scale Nature Recovery Projects. Developed for our Boothby Wildland Landscape Recovery project, and funded by DEFRA, the report was led by the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire and the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Agile Initiative projects at Oxford University, with the objective of establishing a framework for enhancing and embedding stakeholder engagement