Publications

The Oxford delegation’s COP 16 Debrief

The headlines and statements that come out of COP16 rarely provide the full picture of what has occurred. We are lucky enough to have our Oxford Delegation deeply involved in participation and observation of some key moments as well as having off the record conversations with ministers, senior environmental figures and heads of state.

To find out what really happened, and understand more about the overall experience of attending, while hearing an honest assessment of COP 16’s strengths and failures, you are invited to join us for our COP debrief.

Zhang-Zheng H; Deng X; Stocker B; Ding R; Thomson E; Gutiérrez JA; Adu-Bredu S; Duah-Gyamfi A; Gvozdevaite A; Moore S (2024). Why models underestimate West African tropical forest productivity. .

Tropical forests dominate terrestrial photosynthesis, yet there are major contradictions in our understanding due to a lack of field studies, especially outside the tropical Americas. A recent field study indicated that West African forests have among the highest forests gross primary productivity (GPP) yet observed, contradicting models that rank them lower than Amazonian forests. Here, we explore possible reasons for this data-model mismatch. We found the in situ GPP measurements higher than multiple global GPP products at the studied sites in Ghana. The underestimation of GPP by models largely disappears when a standard photosynthesis model is informed by local field-measured values of (a) fractional absorbed photosynthetic radiation (fAPAR), and (b) photosynthetic traits. Satellites systematically underestimate fAPAR in the tropics due to cloud contamination issues. The study highlights the potential widespread underestimation of tropical forests GPP and carbon cycling and hints at the ways forward for model and input data improvement.

Nature Seminar Series: Reimagining Bretton Woods: placing nature at the heart of global finance and governance

Dr. Nicola Ranger, University of Oxford

Abstract:
Eighty years ago in 1944, on the eve of the end of World War II, world leaders came together in Bretton Woods USA with the shared ambition to shape a new global financial and monetary system that would ensure the economic stability and development necessary to avoid future crises and wars. The systems and institutions that emerged – including the World Bank and the IMF – helped shape economic history from then on and presided over an unprecedented period of growth and poverty alleviation around the world. Arguably however, they also presided (and some authors would argue contributed to) a period of unprecedented environmental damage and biodiversity loss. Nature was not on the agenda in 1944. It is today. In this talk – almost exactly two years after the signing of the Global Biodiversity Framework and with only six years to go to meet its 2030 targets – I will discuss how the global financial system needs to evolve to address the combined global challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. I will particularly focus on the role of the World Bank, IMF and Central Banks. I will propose that the World Bank – as the only global financial institution with the explicit mandate, financial firepower and convening power to address these global challenges – has a particularly important role to play and draw upon both research and my own experience to propose solutions. I’ll argue for why we need to power up our public financial institutions, including reforming our development finance architecture. I’ll also argue for why the IMF and Central Banks need to do more to explicitly recognise the systemic risks from biodiversity loss across their operations and policies. A theme throughout the talk will be on the role of data, analytics and modelling in underpinning and informing action, giving examples from my own research, as well as discuss the new frontiers of research required in order to place nature at the heart of global finance and governance.

Flurina M. Wartmann, Jamie Lorimer (2024). Is messy the new beautiful? Why debates about what nature recovery looks like matter. People and Nature.

Current aspirations for nature recovery to address biodiversity loss and climate change will involve changing what landscapes look like, which can create challenging aesthetic experiences for members of the public.
In this study, we interrogate the role of aesthetics in shaping visions of nature recovery, focussing on the construction and contestation of ‘mess’ and ‘messiness’ in nature recovery.

Why we need transformative scenarios for people and nature: Building capacities to imagine safe and just futures for all life on Earth

Laura Pereira

There is general scientific agreement on the need for transformative change in order to address the systemic poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities globally. However, what this transformative change is and what the future looks like if we are able to achieve it remains opaque. It is important to recognise that there is a plurality of desirable futures that could emerge from transformative interventions; these aspirational futures will look different in different contexts and from different people’s perspectives and knowledge systems. When it comes to detailing how to achieve these outcomes, there is a dearth of scenarios detailing preferable futures for people and nature. In this talk, I will unpack some of the thinking that has gone into trying to address this gap through the development of the Nature Futures Framework. I will also outline some of the capacities that are needed in order to expand and further develop the framework, especially in the context of modelling how to achieve a safe and just future for all life on Earth- a task currently being undertaken by the Transformation Pathways workstream of the Earth Commission.

Laura Pereira is a Professor in Sustainability Transformations and Futures at the Global Change Institute, Wits University and a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. She is an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, having been trained in ecology, law, zoology and human geography. She completed her DPhil in Geography at St Hilda’s College, Oxford in 2012, before working internationally at various institutions including the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, City University of London and Utrecht University. She is interested in the role of futures thinking in enabling transformative change and in developing innovative methods for knowledge co-production in Global South contexts, especially around issues of equity and justice in the construction of pathways to live within Earth System Boundaries. Laura is currently an Earth Commissioner and an expert in the IPBES Task Force on scenarios and models.

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.
Transcript

Nature Series Seminar: Making nature-markets work in the 21st century: evidence from England, Australia, and the EU

There is a global biodiversity funding gap, and rapid efforts to mobilise private funding to fill this gap. Attempts to commodify biodiversity to create markets and harness return-seeking investment into conservation have now been practiced for half a century. What have we learned about how or whether private finance can become part of the solution, rather than a systemic driver, of biodiversity loss? In this talk I’ll give a tour of a few biodiversity markets we’ve studied in England and Australia and highlight what we’ve learned about how to make nature-markets work for nature.

Mattia C. Mancini, Rebecca M. Collins, Ethan T. Addicott, Ben J. Balmford, Amy Binner, Joseph W. Bull, Brett H. Day, Felix Eigenbrod, Sophus O.S.E. zu Ermgassen, Michela Faccioli, Carlo Fezzi, Ben Groom, E.J. Milner-Gulland, Nathan Owen, Diana Tingley, Emma Wright, Ian J. Bateman (2024). Biodiversity offsets perform poorly for both people and nature, but better approaches are available. One Earth.

Highlights
• Local planning constraints deliver poor biodiversity net gain (BNG) offsets
• Removing those constraints results in significant BNG improvements
• Alternatively, offsets can deliver gains in environmental access

Dahlsjö CAL  (2023). Strategies to manage tree pest and disease outbreaks: a balancing act.. BMC Ecology and Evolution.

Tree diseases are one of the major threats to forests worldwide. As the frequency and severity of disease outbreaks increase, effective prevention and mitigation strategies are urgently needed. Emerging methods are available to tackle this issue, however, trade-offs and potential ecological consequences should be considered for successful forest preservation.

Wu H; Dahlsjö CAL; Malhi Y (2024). Evaluating the impact of an invasive pathogen on tree population decline: An evidence based modelling approach..  Forest Ecology and Management.

Highlights

• A complexity-appropriate model was developed to forecast an invasive forest disease
• If 15 % of trees are resistant they create an efficient buffer against population decline
• Our modelling framework helps prediction, error assessment, and scenario building

Dahlsjö CAL; Malhi Y (2024). Unravelling a hidden synergy: How pathogen-climate interactions transform habitat hydrology and affect tree growth.. Science of The Total Environment, 954, 176325..

Interactions between multiple global change stressors are a defining characteristic of the Anthropocene. Tree-associated pathogens are affecting forested ecosystems worldwide and occur in the context of increased frequency and intensity of extreme climate events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods. The effects of these events, along with subsequent changes in environmental conditions, on remaining and regenerating trees, are not well understood but crucial for the restoration and conservation of forested habitats.

Fixing ourselves to fix nature? Inner change as a neglected lever to tackle environmental crisis

Tom Oliver argues that our current fixes for the environmental crisis are often ineffective and even make things worse. Genuine solutions need to go beyond economic and technological ‘sticking plasters’ and require inner change.

Nature Seminar Series – Toward a General Theory Predicting Biodiversity and Ecosystem Responses to Global Change

Professor. Brian Enquist. University of Arizona

Developing a predictive science of the Biosphere and more powerful tests of biodiversity theories need to move beyond species richness, data driven approaches, and overly parameterized models to explicitly focus on mechanisms generating diversity via size and trait composition. The rise of scaling based theory and trait-based ecology has led to an increased focus on the distribution and dynamics of traits across broad geographic and climatic gradients and how these distributions influence ecosystem function. In this talk I will present a synthesis of trait-based and metabolic scaling approaches into a framework that we term ‘Trait Driver Theory’ or TDT.