The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
Results based payments and REDD+ safeguards: Challenges for demonstrating and verifying the social and environmental integrity of Verified Emission Reductions at jurisdictional scale Billions of dollars of results-based financing for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) at jurisdictional and project scales are expected to be delivered over the next 5 years through voluntary carbon markets or results-based payments (RBP) schemes such as the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) Carbon Fund ($700m committed to 15 countries), the Green Climate Fund’s (GCF) REDD+ Results-based Payments Pilot Programme ($500m already transferred to GCF Accredited Entities for 8 countries), and Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance (LEAF) Coalition ($1bn pledged, 5 signed Letters of Intent, and 30 applicants to date). However, jurisdictions face challenges on multiple fronts in order to access market and non-market results-based finance for REDD+. One key challenge is being to demonstrate conformance with REDD safeguard requirements. For over a decade we have worked to identify and address the challenges faced by jurisdictions in conforming with REDD safeguards and also with standard bodies, funds and donors on the challenges of verifying conformance.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
The talk a) showcases some cities that have incorporated biodiversity conservation successfully, b) shares how the National Parks Board of Singapore (NParks) implements its City in Nature vision and c) illustrates how NParks identifies problems, crafts specific problem statements, works with the scientific community to design research projects that seek nature-based solutions, interprets the data, translates the results to policies, operationalises the recommendations on the ground and devises evaluation and monitoring programmes – all in one government agency collaborating in an interdisciplinary manner and comprehensively with multi-governmental agencies, academic community, and the public (NGOs, citizen scientists, etc.).
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
Heidi Hawkins – The Savory Institute claims that Holistic Management (HM) increases production of plants and grazing animals while also increasing soil organic carbon under all conditions in all habitats. Claims have been heavily marketed and popularized in the media including via the now-famous TEDTalk. However, peer-review literature, including our meta-analysis, and a recent review focussed on farm-scale studies, do not support these claims. In this talk we will present this evidence, while addressing some of the criticisms levelled against scientific studies by HM supporters. Finally, we will discuss the social dynamics within HM communities and what lessons these might provide.
Supporters of HM criticize small-scale studies (less than 2 ha), reasonably proposing that production and climate benefits only emerge on large working farms (2-66 ha or larger, our size definitions). In response, we reviewed 22 farm-scale studies from across the globe, and the few social and soil carbon studies available. The review supported the findings of previous meta-analyses, i.e., HM’s intensive grazing approach either has no effect or reduces production, thus negating the claim by HM proponents that there is a difference between ‘the science and the practice’. Seven peer-reviewed studies show that the potential for increased carbon sequestration with changed grazing management is substantially less (0.13-0.32) than the 2.5-9 t C ha-1 yr-1 estimated by non-peer-review HM literature. Interestingly, five studies show that HM provides a social support framework for land users. The social cohesion, learning and networking so prevalent on HM farms could be adopted by any farming community without accepting the unfounded HM rhetoric, and governments could allocate funds to train extension agents accordingly. A future focus on collaborative adaptive farm management and other innovations will be more helpful than any further debate about grazing density.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
How long does it take for an ecosystem to recover after it is disturbed or destroyed by human activities? How do we know when an ecosystem has recovered? In this lecture, restoration ecologist
David Moreno Mateos discusses the traditional methods used to assess the recovery of terrestrial ecosystems—such as changes in biodiversity or soil carbon levels, highlighting their limitations. He makes a case for more comprehensive & long-term approaches to understanding & measuring ecosystem recovery, highlighting their potential for enhancing environmental policies & large-scale restoration strategies.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
Signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Biodiversity Framework promised to work towards halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity by 2030 – a bold mission, and one which has a plethora of sub-targets and indicators associated with it. How these indicators will scale from local to global and how they can be aggregated to track progress, let alone guide action, is an open question. Further, there is an increasing push towards Nature Positive at the organisational level – which also requires metrics to track and report biodiversity impacts, positive and negative, and for the nascent associated biodiversity credits market. Amid this complexity, where is our lodestar target and metric equivalent to 1.5 degrees and tCO2? Is it even feasible to think that such a metric could ever exist for something as spatially and temporally heterogeneous and complex as biodiversity? In this talk I explore these issues and share some ideas about ways forward.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.
Global historical reconstructions of human transformation and use of landscapes confirms that most of terrestrial nature as we know it, including Earth’s most biodiverse landscapes, are cultural legacies of centuries to millennia of sustained human use. Efforts to build a better future for people and the nature begin by recognizing that cultural natures, including those sustained by indigenous peoples for millennia, not natures without people, are the greatest planetary opportunities for recovering and sustaining Earth’s biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Even the most intensively used working landscapes on Earth, including cities and farms, are central to a nature positive future.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or their researchers.
Over the past half decade, the UK has set a net zero goal and nature restoration targets, both of which require very substantial land use change. However, the UK uses 70% of its land surface, and an equivalent area overseas, to produce the food we eat. On the face of it, the UK is headed for land use conflict, and it is not alone: most countries face the same climate-nature-food challenge.
This talk, which draws on analysis done for in the National Food Strategy and subsequent work done at Green Alliance, a leading UK environmental think tank, will show how land use in the UK and other European countries can change to give us everything we want from land, and what trade-offs policymakers will have to make to enable land to change rapidly enough to meet our goals.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.
The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.
Ecologists study living organisms and their interactions with the physical environment, but as ecologists we seldom attempt to understand ecosystems in their entirety. This seminar will present a system-level overview of the ecological processes operating in a Malaysian rainforest, and explain how we are converting this knowledge into a digital twin ecosystem – the virtual rainforest.
This talk will consider our broken relationship with nature and introduce the science of nature connectedness, why it matters and how to improve it in order to unite both human and nature’s wellbeing.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, the Biodiversity Network, or their researchers.