Publications

OTP Methodology

Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Sandra Díaz, Sami W. Rifai et al. (2025). Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change. Nature.

Species are expected to shift their ranges as the climate changes, but shifts may not occur fast enough, especially for immobile species such as plants. Two papers in this issue assess the degree to which plant species are tracking climate change in the American tropics, where data availability has constrained inference. Ramírez-Barahona et al. show that in Mesoamerican cloud forests, climate change and deforestation together have led to a mean upward shift in species ranges since 1979, mainly due to contracting lower range edges. In tropical forests across the Americas, Aguirre-Gutiérrez et al. found that tree traits are not shifting fast enough to track climate change based on trait-climate relationships, with smaller shifts in montane forests

Land use framework consultation (England)

The UK Government published a consultation on a proposed Land Use Framework (LUF) for England in early 2025.  Academics associated with LCNR came together create a response to the consultation that draws on a diverse range of expertise and experience.  Overall, LCNR welcomed the work that had gone into creating the LUF, but made several suggestions that should improve outcomes for nature as well as supporting efforts to attain national objectives on health, food, agriculture and net zero.

Oxford Nature Conversations Project Citizens’ Jury on People & Nature

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.

Constance L. McDermott, Thomas Addoah, Tawiah Agyarko-Kwarteng, Rebecca Asare, Alex Assanvo, Mairon Bastos Lima, Helen Bellfield, Amanda Berlan, Sophia Carodenuto, Toby Gardner, Rachael D. Garrett, Caitlin Hafferty, Mark Hirons, Verina Ingram, Eric Mensah Kumeh, Joss Lyons-White, John Mason, Patrick Meyfroidt, Jasper Montana, Gustavo L.T. de Oliveira, Sabaheta Ramcilovik-Suominen, Metodi Sotirov, William Thompson, Georg Winkel (2025). Equity in unilateral value chain policies: A monitoring framework for the EUDR and beyond. Forest Policy and Economics.

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

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.

Response to questions in the Planning Reform Working Paper on Development and Nature Recovery

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.

Eric Mensah Kumeh, Mark Hirons (2025). Understanding actors’ power through conflict dynamics: Insights from small-scale mining on cocoa farms. Forest Policy and Economics.

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.

Regenerative Agriculture in the UK. An ecological perspective

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.

Summary report here

Net zero v No Net Loss: Why carbon markets aren’t a good model for investing in nature recovery

Finance Theme Lead Alex Teytelboym, recently took part in a webinar analyzing approaches to scaling investment in nature recovery. At a time of urgent need for private finance to pick up the heavy lifting in nature recovery, Alex discussed why existing market designs such as carbon and Biodiversity Net Gain are not sufficient to scale investment in nature, and use an innovative case study to demonstrate how a different, auction based approach, could scale and enable investment.

Equity in Urban Green Space Access and Governance: an interdisciplinary Oxford case study.

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).

Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Sami W. Rifai, Xiongjie Deng, Hans ter Steege, Eleanor Thomson, Yadvinder Malhi, et al. (2025). Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests. Nature.

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.