There is growing interest in developing generalisable, standardised measurements of biodiversity, in particular to help the business and financial sectors to quantify biodiversity impacts. In their recent paper, Dr Hannah Wauchope and colleagues created a framework to explain how such units are defined in the rapidly growing voluntary biodiversity credits market. In this seminar, Hannah Wauchope will present this framework and use it to discuss the many measurement challenges that are faced in trying to reduce something as complex as biodiversity to a single unit, and what this might mean for biodiversity credit markets.

About the speaker Hannah Wauchope is a Lecturer in Ecology and Conservation at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines how we measure biodiversity and our impacts upon it for policy and practice. Hannah studied zoology and ecology at the University of Queensland (Australia). She worked with the Australian Antarctic Division, before embarking on a PhD at the University of Cambridge to study the effects of protected areas on waterbird populations and related methodologies. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she was an 1851 Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, studying the impact of warming on species in the past (through the Holocene and late Quaternary) as a way of improving understanding of range shifts and help draw generalisations about how other species will move in the future.

This seminar was a part of the NatureFinance@Oxford seminar series, a collaboration between Resilience Planet Finance Lab, Oxford Nature Positive hub, Department of Biology. The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery was a co-host for this seminar. More information on this seminar series: https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/page/naturefinanceoxford-seminar-series