Past events

Monetary valuation of nature Pragmatic conservation of unhelpful commodification of nature

Event ended: 17 February 2023

The valuation of nature and ecosystem services in monetary units plays a central role in many forms of environmental governance, including in carbon and biodiversity markets and offsetting schemes which are increasingly under scrutiny. The idea of using monetary units to value nature has precipitated significant debate, with proponents contending that it represents a pragmatic […]

Recording available

Results based payments and REDD+ safeguards

Event ended: 04 November 2022

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 […]

Recording available

Overcoming our societal addiction to growth to build a sustainable wellbeing future

Event ended: 17 February 2023

Our global society is hopelessly addicted to a particular vision of the world and a future that has become both unsustainable and undesirable. In this lecture Robert Costanza spoke about his new book, Addicted to Growth, which frames our current predicament as a societal addiction to a ‘growth at all costs’ economic paradigm. While economic […]

Recording available

Rewilding, we can’t live without it

Event ended: 24 February 2023

Charlie is the inspiration behind Knepp Wildland, a 3,500 acre estate in West Sussex and the largest rewilding project in lowland Britain. Switching to ‘process-led’ conservation, using free-roaming herds of grazing animals, Knepp is now a hotspot for numerous endangered species like turtle-doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies and has become a leading light in […]

Recording available

Prescribing nature for human health

Event ended: 18 November 2022

The past few decades have been a large global increase in the incidence of non- communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular, respiratory, and mental illnesses. These conditions now account for more than 50% of annual deaths worldwide (WHO 2021: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases ). Alongside the rise in these NCDs, there has also been a large emerging scientific evidence-base […]

Recording available

40 years of conservation in Sabah

Event ended: 04 July 2023

In his talk, “40 years of conservation in Sabah”, Glyn will consider the changes that have taken place in this Bornean state of East Malaysia since the late 1970s. Early survey results will be compared with more recent research findings to illustrate the impacts of timber logging, palm oil production and hunting on orangutans, elephants, […]

Recording available

Connected Conservation: rethinking conservation for a telecoupled world

Event ended: 16 June 2023

Connected Conservation is a dual-branched conservation model that calls for the conservation community to embrace novel actions to tackle distant wealth-related drivers of biodiversity decline, while enhancing site-level conservation to empower biodiversity stewards.

Recording available

A future for nature: quantitative perspectives on land and biodiversity under global change

Event ended: 28 June 2023

Our understanding of nature is incomplete, and nowhere is this more evident than when faced with the challenge of maintaining a viable natural world under the dual pressures of land use and climate change. Differing values and ad hoc solutions risk an incoherent and piecemeal response, with nebulous consequences. We need clearly defined measures of […]

Recording available

Climate change and nature recovery from global thinking to local action

Event ended: 14 June 2023

The links between the climate and nature crises are clear. Climate shapes patterns of biodiversity at all scales from global to local; ecosystems are key to the global carbon cycle and often mediate the impacts of climate change on people. The latest IPCC reports show how the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity […]

Recording available

The new Global Biodiversity Framework the good, the bad and the narratives

Event ended: 14 June 2023

In December 2022, the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity enshrined the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This policy instrument will structure all the global intergovernmental action on biodiversity during the next ten years. It is thus bound to have massive influence on what will be done (or not) in this field. I will […]

Recording available