A report for the Woodland Trust (2025)
Biodiversity net gain is envisaged to become one of the Westminster government’s main tools for financing nature conservation. However, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) has a widely known emphasis on the creation of fast-maturing habitats, such as grassland, and its potential impacts on woodland are unstudied. This article outlines the relationship between BNG and woodlands. Firstly, the article shows how the BNG metric works and demonstrate how this biases the mechanism against the creation and enhancement of woodland in its very construction. Then, the article report the results of a model which simulates the transitions of every habitat type into every other possible habitat type, to evaluate how many units one can deliver through creating or enhancing woodland relative to other habitat types, which yields insights into whether landholders will be incentivised to deliver woodland over other habitat types …
Related Research Themes
Ecology
Testing the effectiveness of different ecological approaches for nature recovery to support biodiversity and the delivery of ecosystem services such as climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Finance
Scaling finance and investment for rapid nature recovery at a global scale.
Systems
Developing a novel Analysis and Decision Platform to integrate nature recovery into land-use and infrastructure planning, and exploring scenarios that can deliver local, national and international commitments to nature, climate change and sustainable development.
