News/events type: Blog

Whilst most studies on the ecosystem functioning of tropical forests have focussed extensively on Latin America or Asia, researchers at the University of Oxford say comparing findings with studies in Ghana has produced interesting and differing results showing that more studies need to be made in Africa.

Tropical forests cover large areas of equatorial Africa and play a significant role in the global carbon cycle. Scientists from the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, in close partnership with collaborators at the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG), have been looking at the carbon budget in both the Amazon and West Africa by undertaking detailed field assessments of the carbon budget of multiple forest sites.

The researchers monitored 14 one-hectare plots along an aridity gradient in Ghana. When compared with an equivalent aridity gradient in Amazonia that they had previously studied using the same measurement protocol, the studied West African forests generally had higher productivity and more rapid carbon cycling.

Their findings have been published in Nature Communications: Contrasting carbon cycle along tropical forest aridity gradients in West Africa and Amazonia.

Lead author Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre, said:

“Tropical forests are so diverse that we are constantly surprised when opening new study sites. I became  fascinated with West African forests because of this study, but I am sure there are more fascinating tropical forests yet to discover.”

“When we’re talking about carbon budgets, you can’t just study a stand of forests and imagine that applies to even nearby forests. Carbon budgets vary greatly from wet to dry regions in the tropics.

“Having studied the carbon budget in the Amazon it was interesting to see that West African forests are more productive, have more photosynthesis and absorb more energy. And we don’t quite understand why this is the case. This is an important region and shouldn’t be ignored. Our new findings were able to tell us a different story than our previous studies in the Amazonia, and has stimulated new questions and new research.”

The work carried out is part of the Global Ecosystem Monitoring network (GEM), an international effort to measure and understand forest ecosystem functions and traits, and how these will respond to climate change. GEM was created 2005 under the leadership of Prof Yadvinder Malhi. The GEM network describes the productivity, metabolism and carbon cycle of mainly tropical forests and savannas.

Professor Malhi said:

“Ecology is a global science, and equal long-term partnerships are essential to produce both better science and fairer science. This work is the product of decades of long-term partnership between Oxford and institutions in both Africa and South America, work that seen many local students trained and graduating and contributed to building local capacity in environmental science.”

The study is also a fruit of successful collaboration with the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana – CSIR, many scientists from which made fundamental contributions to the study and are coauthors of the publication.

One of the lead Ghanaian collaborators, Said Akwasi Duah-Gyamfi, Senior Research Scientist, CSIR-Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, said:

“It was a wonderful experience to be part of the research team, and most importantly to explore and generate knowledge on topical issues about forests in Africa.”

Read the paper in full: Contrasting carbon cycle along tropical forest aridity gradients in West Africa and Amazonia

Read more about GEM: The Global Ecosystems Monitoring network: Monitoring ecosystem productivity and carbon cycling across the tropics

Martha Crockatt

I’m writing this in mid-April; although there has been wind, rain and even hail in the last few days, hawthorn, tulips and forget-me-nots are blooming, bees are starting to buzz and the sun, when it does come out from behind a cloud, is warm – it’s a lovely time to be outdoors in parks, gardens or just walking. It’s easy to take these green spaces and what they offer us for granted, but not everyone has the same access to them. Publicly accessible greenspace refers to areas of mainly natural outdoor space that the public can visit at any time without cost, including parks, nature reserves, playing fields, canal paths, cemeteries and common land – the places that we visit to enjoy exercise, give children a place to play, meet friends, spend time in nature, and so on.

There is a wealth of evidence that spending time in greenspace is good for mental and physical health and wellbeing. We want these benefits to be freely available to everyone across all parts of society, but unfortunately, this is not always the case. There is evidence that the health benefits of spending time in greenspace are greater in more socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods, which typically have higher levels of poor health to start with than in more affluent areas. However, these more deprived areas can have less access to greenspace.

With this in mind, I started a project in collaboration with Wild Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership and Oxfordshire County Council, as well as colleagues in the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery at the University of Oxford, to identify neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire that are both socio-economically deprived and lack access to greenspace. The aim in identifying these areas is to help support and prioritise funding and efforts to improve greenspace quantity and quality in these areas, which could benefit most from better access to greenspace.

Using data published by Natural England, we looked not only at how much accessible greenspace is present within local neighbourhoods, but also other factors that can make a difference to how much exposure people can get to greenspace and nature. This included the potential for overcrowding in greenspace, as well as the density of Public Rights of Way, how much of a neighbourhood is man-made surfaces and the area of private gardens within a neighbourhood.

Using these factors, we identified 16 neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire that are relatively socio-economically deprived, and lack access to green space according to multiple metrics. It’s important to point out that these neighbourhoods have been identified in a purely desk-based study; what the data tells us may not reflect people’s lived experiences, and the data may not be 100% accurate. Before making any decisions based on the findings, it’s vital to get out into the neighbourhoods, to understand how accurate the mapping is, as well as how communities use their greenspace and what they want from them. The neighbourhoods identified in the report are all urban–densely populated areas where it is usually not possible to create new parks. We need to explore how to make the most of existing greenspace, so that it works for local communities; we need to protect what greenspace we already have; we need to look for opportunities to increase green infrastructure (street trees, pocket parks, green roofs, etc.), and we need to do this strategically to increase connectivity of accessible greenspace for people and nature. You can read the full report here.

Is there a greenspace in your neighbourhood that you value, or have ideas for how to make it more user-friendly for the local community? Larger parks often have a “Friends of” group that you could get involved with. Check out the map on Wild Oxfordshire’s website and find out if there are any community nature groups near you. The website includes guidance on setting up a group if there isn’t one near you, examples of what others have done, sources of funding, and practical steps on how to create space for nature. It’s worth being aware that the County Council is responsible for Public Rights of Way, but that parks and play areas are typically (but not always) run by your local District, City, Parish, or Town council; visit the relevant council website and search for “parks” to find a list of areas that they are responsible for, or you could consider contacting your local councillor about a specific issue. For an interactive way to see where local green space is, visit the England-wide greenspace data on Natural England’s website. Your local council or nature group may also have events such as Community Walks that you can join in, such as these walks run by South Oxfordshire District Council and these in Kidlington. Sign up for Wild Oxfordshire’s monthly email Bulletin, and follow them on social media to hear all the news, training, events, and funding opportunities for nature; Community Action Groups (CAG) Oxfordshire’s newsletter is another great source of information on how you get involved in local community action.

However you do it, enjoy exploring your local greenspaces.

Dr Caitlin Hafferty

Social science researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR) are collaborating with Highlands Rewilding to explore innovative digital technologies for enhancing community engagement in rewilding.

Highlands Rewilding, which aims to both re-wild and re-people the Scottish Highlands through Nature-based Solutions, is working closely with the LCNR to improve its strategy for community engagement that fosters meaningful partnerships for landscape-scale nature recovery, and works closely with residents and groups to deliver local benefits. These efforts are inspired by the belief that local communities must be closely involved in nature recovery, and that collaboration is key for finding ways to bring social, economic, and environmental benefits. Highlands Rewilding aims to engage communities on their plans for their land, and in developing joint projects which can help deliver on community aspirations in harmony with their vision for long-term nature recovery.

To help bring multiple partners together across the landscapes, Highlands Rewilding and the LCNR have co-developed three digital community engagement platforms using software called Commonplace. The Commonplace team provides innovative digital solutions for creating positive change for thriving and resilient places, powered by data and collaboration between diverse groups.

The Highlands Rewilding community engagement platforms – which have been specifically designed for their three rewilding sites, Tayvallich, Bunloit, and Beldorney – have been launched this week. The sites currently include a survey, led by the Highlands Rewilding team, on community joint ventures. The LCNR team is launching its research in Summer 2024.

Dr Caitlin Hafferty, Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental Social Science at the LCNR, said: “This project is an exciting opportunity to change how nature recovery is done to deliver multiple benefits for people, nature, and climate within a participatory governance framework. By using digital tools to bring multiple actors together across landscapes, we aim to investigate the balance between fostering meaningful engagement at the local level while considering broader goals and incentives.”

Dr Calum Brown, Co-chief Scientist at Highlands Rewilding, said “These new approaches are very promising for involving more people, more deeply, in nature restoration. Alongside other methods, digital tools for community engagement allow us to explore how we can conduct socio-economic baselining to feed into broader decision-making processes around nature-based solutions. We’re looking forward to really constructive, practical outcomes from this project.”

The team is exploring the potential of innovative digital tools for the collection, analysis, and integration of community priorities and socio-economic data in rewilding governance. Collaborating with Commonplace has provided an exciting opportunity to transparently share information about rewilding projects, consult members of the community on specific land-use decisions, bring together different actors across the landscape to foster meaningful collaboration, and explore different pathways towards promoting an ongoing culture of engagement. Specific tools include project information pages, public forums, surveys, digital participatory mapping, photo elicitation, and using mobile apps to supplement in-person methods like interviews and focus groups.

View the new Commonplace websites for Tayvallich, Bunloit, and Beldorney

This work is part of Highlands Rewilding’s Engagement Roadmap, which outlines their broader and ongoing strategy for engagement and community benefits from rewilding. The Roadmap is based on evidence-led guidance called the Recipe for Engagement (RfE), which was developed by the LCNR and Agile Initiative at the University of Oxford.

Blog by Kay Jenkinson, Knowledge Exchange Specialist, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, University of Oxford; and Dr Sarah Higginson, Knowledge Exchange Specialist, Innovation and Engagement, Research Services, University of Oxford

For academics seeking to bridge the gap between their research and policy-making, the journey to impact can be both challenging and rewarding. The impact process is often nuanced, and marked by slow progress with occasional unexpected bursts of action and achievement. Rather annoyingly, it can be the casual interactions at events or a small action arising from a meeting that can lead to the greatest impact.

However, some fairly simple planning can help to ensure that you know the people you need to contact, have the right materials to engage them and are well-placed to contribute your evidence to (policy) discussions and development.

Discover some useful hints and tips for your ‘journey to impact’ here in their blog

 

Can theatre games help catalyse interdisciplinarity for nature recovery?

Authors: E.A. Welden and Jasper Montana

We know that working together across different scientific fields is necessary to tackle today’s environmental challenges. But, that is easier said than done. A wide range of barriers to interdisciplinarity, from research funding mechanisms to organisational structures in academia, consistently prevent different disciplines from connecting with one another(1). The disconnect also comes down to a communication challenge across different research cultures. To overcome these, we have identified a need to break outside of traditional, text-based, academic communication and explore other ways of connecting and communicating across disciplines in environmental research.

We are part of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR) team that have been developing and testing methods that actively ‘practice interdisciplinarity’(2) through our project Innovative methods to connect and communicate between disciplines.

As part of our project, we ran the first of a series of catalytic theatre-based workshops with academics and research administrators at the Old Fire Station Theatre, Oxford, in December 2023. In the workshop, participants drawn from different disciplines within the LCNR were asked to work together to test out a set of pre-designed theatre-based activities intended to catalyse interdisciplinarity. Check out our first two Interdisciplinary Catalyst Activities: Fieldwork tennis and Object of significance.

Why this approach?

While using theatre games to catalyse interdisciplinarity may initially appear strange, this is precisely the point. Putting aside scientific articles and textbooks, we wanted to experiment with ways to use voices and bodies to enhance the communication repertoire for interdisciplinary working. Inspired by Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler(3) and Donna Haraway(4), we wanted to bring into practice theoretical ideas of ‘embodiment’—the political act of being in one’s body—as a subversive way of going against normal modes of academic interaction.

The use of theatre-based approaches in facilitating cross-cultural dialogue, collaboratively exploring the future, and challenging established power dynamics is nothing new in sustainability research(5,6). Much previous work in this area takes inspiration from forum theatre, which is a theory and method that encourages participation amongst actors and audiences (‘spect-actors’) to communicate oppression of peoples and advocate for social and political justice in an embodied way — i.e. in a way that is felt and experienced through enactment(7). This kind of practice is considered to have the potential to transform both participants’ attitudes and everyday practice(8).

What next?

Building on this tradition, our plan is to develop a series of activities that can be used to draw attention to, offer experiences of, and facilitate conversations about some of the barriers and opportunities of interdisciplinary environmental research. Following the success of our workshop in December 2023, we plan to run another series of workshops later in 2024 to test and refine further activities with takeaways for interdisciplinary working. We hope the activities will be transferable to similar interdisciplinary environmental initiatives or training programmes elsewhere.

Developing the activities

The seeds of the catalytic theatre-based workshop began in early 2023 when we first met Lizzy McBain and Emma Webb from Oxford People’s Theatre. Both are theatre professionals with experience of engaging diverse communities through theatre workshops and collaborative projects. Bringing together their depth of experience in theatre games with our knowledge and questions around interdisciplinarity in environmental research, we began collaboratively developing activities that we could test in the LCNR workshop. The games Lizzy and Emma first recommended (and we subsequently built upon) not only drew on a long tradition of warm-ups for theatre, but also the tradition of theatre as politics, allowing us to think about power through embodied play. The wealth of knowledge of Lizzy and Emma has been crucial, as well as resources such as Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal.

In developing the activities, we wanted to get to the crux of interdisciplinary communication challenges. Activities needed to be thought provoking and memorable. We worked together to critically reflect: Did the activity spark questions in us that we want discussed? Did they get us thinking and moving in interesting ways? Through this iterative development process, where we tried one version of an activity, then another, then circled back to a previous one, we selected and refined the activities to run in the initial workshop.

What were the activities like?

The first workshop ran for three hours and included three activities. To provide a brief taster, one of the activities we ran we called Object of Significance. With this activity (follow link for more detailed instructions), we put participants into three groups, with each group receiving an ‘object of significance’. In our case this object was three almost-identical pinecones. Each group was then also given an identity and an objective: one group represented members of a local community and were tasked with coming up with why the pinecone was important to their community; another group were members of a conservation organisation and tasked with coming up with how to protect the pinecone; and the last a group were scientists tasked with coming up with how to study the pinecone. After discussing this amongst their groups, everyone then regrouped, sharing the ‘rituals’ they came up with regarding the object. Then, they were tasked with coming up with a way forward for using, protecting, and studying the pinecone, which speaks to all the held values by each group. Through this activity and discussion, the participants thought through how ‘meanings and values matter,’ with different groups holding different meanings and values for the same object, like in interdisciplinary research spaces.

Want to give them a try?

This is just one of up to ten Interdisciplinary Catalyst Activities that we aim to produce by the end of 2024. The first two – Fieldwork tennis and Object of significance – are available on the project website and can be replicated by others interested in interdisciplinary environmental research. We invite you to give them a try.

Annie E.A. Welden, School of Geography and the Environment and Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, University of Oxford.

Jasper Montana, School of Geography and the Environment; Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, University of Oxford; Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University.

 

1.      Hakkarainen, V., Mäkinen‐Rostedt, K., Horcea‐Milcu, A., D’Amato, D., Jämsä, J., & Soini, K. (2022). Transdisciplinary research in natural resources management: Towards an integrative and transformative use of co‐concepts. Sustainable Development (Bradford, West Yorkshire, England), 30(2), 309–325. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2276

2.      LÉLÉ, S., & NORGAARD, R. B. (2005). Practicing Interdisciplinarity. Bioscience, 55(11), 967–975. https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2005)055[0967:PI]2.0.CO;2

3.      Butler, J. (2011). Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of “sex.” Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203828274

4.      Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

5.      Heras, M., & T bara, J. D. (2014). Let’s play transformations! Performative methods for sustainability. Sustainability Science, 9(3), 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0245-9

6.      Heras López, M., & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals. (2015). Towards new forms of learning : exploring the potential of participatory theatre in sustainability science. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

7.      Boal, A. (1974). Theatre of the oppressed. Pluto Press.

8.      Ibid.

Nat Duffus and Sophus zu Ermgassen explain.

On February 12th, England’s ambitious new environmental policy, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) went live. Underpinned by the Environment Act, this policy lays out the mandatory requirement for new developments to provide a 10% net gain in biodiversity, maintained for at least 30 years. For now, this applies to almost all developments, and will become mandatory for small sites from April 2024, and for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) from November 2025.

The ambition is that instead of driving biodiversity loss, development will now contribute to biodiversity recovery, from housing developments to large solar farms, and to road and rail construction. But what does providing a ‘biodiversity net gain’ mean?

How is Biodiversity Net Gain achieved?

The policy is designed so that the improvement to biodiversity is measurable, using the statutory biodiversity metric. This is a calculation tool, which assigns numerical values called ‘units’ to habitats based on their size, type, and ecological condition. Before development occurs, developers will need to take stock of the units provided by their habitats on-site. Post-development, there will need to be 10% more units than there was to begin with. This is achieved by following a mitigation hierarchy, whereby harms to the habitats are avoided and minimised as much as possible, and harms that do occur will need to be compensated for. This can be done by improving the quality of the habitats remaining and creating new habitats.

It is preferred in the policy that the creation of new habitats occurs in the same place as the impact to biodiversity. This means that it is hoped that under BNG there will be higher levels of greenspace within developments, provided by grassland, ponds, hedgerows, and other natural habitats for wildlife. When on-site habitats are not enough to meet the 10% requirement then off-site gains (offsets) can be purchased.

It is hoped that the developers’ demand for offsets will drive investment into landowners and habitat banks to do large nature recovery projects. This could allow, for example, the creation of wildflower meadows to offset the environmental harms caused by a new housing development.

Researchers have learned a lot about the outcomes of BNG from studying councils which adopted the commitment early. Based on this experience, academics and ecologists are still concerned about several key gaps in the policy which limit the ability of BNG to fulfil its ambitions.

Is BNG delivering for wildlife?

A key concern from academics is that the metric used to score biodiversity may not work in the best interest of wildlife – particularly, for insects, an important but declining component of biodiversity. Grasslands which have nettles, ragwort, thistles, and diverse mosaics of scrub and bare earth support a wealth of rich insect biodiversity. Under BNG, these habitats are penalised in favour of tidy grasslands which may have plenty of flowers but lack the other diverse habitat components necessary to sustain flourishing insect populations.

Not only will habitats potentially be of reduced quality to wildlife, but they will also be smaller, as recent research found that BNG was associated with a large reduction in the area of open greenspace. It was also found that the metric is so flexible that most large developments can meet their entire 10% BNG commitment within the development footprint. This reduces the demand for offsets, and the private investment that could be going into large nature recovery projects, supporting goals such as the 30 by 30 target.

How will BNG be enforced?

Another big risk that has been flagged by researchers is the fact that BNG allows for the trading of existing habitats for promised future habitats. For this trading to work, there needs to be high levels of monitoring and governance, to incentivise compliance with the policy.

Habitats promised on-site within the built environment are at particular risk, owing to the inability of existing planning enforcement mechanisms to tackle BNG non-compliance. Due to this gap, it was previously estimated that a quarter of habitat units delivered under BNG could be unmonitored and effectively unenforceable.

In response to these governance challenges, there has been an increase in the funding afforded to Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) in the run up to BNG and new requirements mean that ‘significant’ gains within the built environment will require a planning agreement. However, there remains significant concern as to whether LPAs are adequately resourced to monitor habitats over 30 years and act against noncompliance.

There are also challenges with securing some habitats within the built environment such as residential gardens and public use grasslands which count toward the BNG requirement. Both will be subject to high levels of use by people and pets, reducing their wildlife value. For gardens, it is not yet clear how their wildlife value will be maintained and not lost to artificial grass, decking, or concrete slabs.

Today is an exciting moment as one of the world’s most ambitious ecological compensation policies is launched. But it is important that we get the nuts and bolts of this policy right to ensure that we are delivering real benefits for biodiversity, and that gains are not just made on paper.

Watch an interview Nat took part in with Trisha Goddard on TalkTV here. Interview starts at 1.46

Originally published in ‘The Conversation‘ here

The Global Biodiversity Framework calls upon the private sector to contribute to nature recovery. But so much about the concept of Nature Positive is ill defined, making it challenging for businesses (and society as a whole) to understand the major shifts required to achieve it.

More research is crucial to help guide and prioritize business actions.

A recent pre-print led jointly by Thomas White (The Biodiversity Consultancy/ University of Oxford) and Talitha Bromwich (Wild Business Ltd /University of Oxford) highlights four  key areas for research.

💡   Strategic options – Setting strategic priorities and actions at the organizational and sectoral levels.
⚙️   Implementation by companies – Designing and implementing business plans and actions to address impacts, protect and restore biodiversity.
💷   Driving processes – Acting to influence the systemic drivers of business action (e.g. policy, finance) that determine the ‘rules of the game’.
📊   Outcomes – Monitoring and reporting outcomes to ensure that action is effective, and scales to deliver outcomes in line with global biodiversity goals.

Tom explains “Businesses have a key role to play in helping bend the curve of biodiversity decline, but there are currently large uncertainties about the suitable strategies and approaches they should take.”

Hollie Booth, a contributing author, adds: “Given the scale of the biodiversity crisis, prioritized research is needed to inform rapid and proportionate action that can deliver the transformative change urgently needed. We hope the research questions we identified can foster collaborative impactful research, enabling meaningful and well-evidenced private sector action which contributes to a nature positive future.”

The paper was produced collaboratively between us and the University of Oxford’s Nature Positive Hub – a research partnership formed to bridge the gap between business practice and conservation science, and deliver practical, prioritized research that delivers for both business and biodiversity.

Learn more about the work programme associated with this paper here

Author: Dr Sophus ze Ermgassen

England will soon introduce one of the world’s most ambitious biodiversity policies in “Biodiversity Net Gain”.

This policy effectively mandates that any new development leaves biodiversity in a better state than before it was constructed. It was initially meant to go into effect in November, but the government has pushed back its implementation until 2024.

In order to understand the potential impacts of the Biodiversity Net Gain, our team has been tracking development projects approved over the last three years in six councils across England that were early adopters of the policy.

Our latest paper, published this month, reveals several fundamental challenges that threaten the integrity of the policy’s environmental and economic outcomes.

We find that the oversight, monitoring and enforcement of biodiversity improvements supposedly delivered under the policy need urgent attention.

For example, there is a clear “governance gap”, where the system for monitoring biodiversity gains delivered on the site of new developments is weaker than for gains purchased from elsewhere. The process is overseen by local planning departments, which are typically lacking in capacity and ecological expertise.

Biodiversity Net Gain is an essential pillar of the country’s plans for attracting private finance into nature conservation to achieve its overarching environmental objectives.

Ultimately, the challenges we identify threaten the integrity of one of England’s most important environmental markets – and with it, the environmental outcomes of the government’s nature markets strategy.

Biodiversity Net Gain

Under the Biodiversity Net Gain policy, developers have three ways to offset their “biodiversity liability” – the damage their project does to nature. Biodiversity Net Gain applies to most developments, such as housing and smaller infrastructure projects. The policy will apply to major infrastructure projects from 2025 onwards.

First, they can enhance biodiversity somewhere within the development – so-called “on-site” gains. These on-site gains can take the form of, for example, sowing wildflowers along road verges or managing some of the grassland within a housing development to promote wildlife, rather than for traditional landscaping.

If developers can’t meet their liabilities on-site, their second option is to use biodiversity “units” from ecological improvements elsewhere. Under the policy, these units are supposed to mirror the habitat that is impacted by the development, so that when developers damage habitats, they must replace them with habitats that are at least as valuable, from a conservation perspective, as those lost.

Some of these units might come from the new “net-gain market”. Land managers create these units by implementing conservation actions on their land, such as converting low-productivity pasture into a field managed for wildflowers. Then, they sell these units to developers.

Alternatively, some developers are developing their own habitat banks, creating biodiversity units in one place to offset the impacts of their developments elsewhere.

Last, if no units are available through either of these pathways, developers can buy “statutory biodiversity credits” directly from the national government.

These credits loosely resemble the units sold via the market. The government holds a stock of these units as a last resort for developers who cannot offset their damage in other ways. For example, they may offset damage to particularly rare types of habitat for which there may not be suitable credits available on the standard market.

Importantly, the price levels for these statutory units have been set deliberately high, in an attempt to disincentivise developers from relying on these credits.

The ‘governance gap’

Our dataset spans around 1,600 hectares of development footprint that have been submitted or approved for development over the last three years in these six early-adopter councils: West and South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse, Cornwall, Leeds City and Tunbridge Wells.

Our team has been collating and analysing the biodiversity assessments submitted to these authorities for each project.

We’ve analysed the trades occurring under the policy and the rules that govern them. Additionally, we have quantified any errors embedded in the developers’ biodiversity assessments. Our research has identified several shortfalls that need addressing for this nature market to be able to deliver on its goals.

Our first key finding is that around one-quarter of all the biodiversity units delivered under the policy so far fall within a “governance gap” – meaning that they are likely to go unmonitored, and may even be legally unenforceable.

As a result, there is a very high probability that regulators will not be able to take any action if these promised gains are not delivered.

This will likely translate into a large chunk of these units not materialising in reality, as there is little incentive for developers to deliver these units in full if there is no credible enforcement mechanism.

The problem is that the standards and regulations of the three offset pathways vary considerably.

There is reasonably stringent governance to ensure that biodiversity units purchased on the offsetting market are delivered in reality. Sellers will have to submit their offsets to a national database, monitor biodiversity changes and report on the ecological development of the site at regular intervals.

Contrary to these standards, the system for monitoring, reporting and enforcing units delivered “on-site” is much weaker. The government has suggested that the existing planning enforcement system can be used to oversee on-site units.

The planning enforcement system was never designed for such a task, and in its current form, is unsuitable for fulfilling this role.

Under the current system, local authorities are explicitly advised to only take enforcement action, such as warnings or fines, if a developer’s violation of a planning condition results in “serious harm to a local public amenity”. Although it is unclear how this will apply to the Biodiversity Net Gain policy, the failure to deliver a habitat that a developer promised in a planning application a few years prior is extremely unlikely to trigger this threshold.

Developers also do not have to log their on-site gains on the national Biodiversity Net Gain register, which means that many of these projects are likely to go unmonitored. Even if they underperform relative to the original promise in the planning application, there is no credible system in place to hold developers to account for such non-delivery.

Risk of non-delivery

In our research, we have found that around one-quarter of all the units delivered under the policy are at a high risk of non-delivery because of this governance gap.

While the regulation of a specific kind of biodiversity unit within a single policy might sound unimportant, this actually has serious implications for how England’s nature markets function.

The core pillar of England’s ambitions for drawing private finance into nature conservation is the Biodiversity Net Gain market. Any biodiversity units that are delivered on-site by developers are units they will not need to purchase from the off-site market. So the less stringent the standards in the on-site system, the more this will drain demand for units from the off-site market, which is relatively more ecologically robust.

Although we recognise our data is preliminary, we estimate that if these under-regulated biodiversity units were to be delivered via the off-site market instead, the demand for biodiversity units could rise by a factor of four.

This could significantly increase the amount of conservation implemented on private land and, therefore, the amount of private finance flowing into conservation projects on private land.

There is precedent for this. The English scheme was partially informed by the US wetland mitigation markets. In 2008, those markets underwent reform to address a similar governance gap.

In the US case, the standards applied to developer-led and third-party projects diverged enormously, meaning a range of low-quality mitigation projects were being implemented by developers. The 2008 compensation rule in the US wetland mitigation system addressed this disparity by ensuring that the same standards were applied across all forms of compensation.

Lacking capacity

Our research also reveals other interesting, consequential patterns. Perhaps the most important to the integrity of this emerging market is the current lack of capacity in local authorities to be able to deliver on the Biodiversity Net Gain policy.

Local authorities do the best they can with the resources they have, but they have undergone stringent funding cuts since 2008.

At the last count, around 60% of local planning authorities have no in-house ecological expertise – which is essential for delivering biodiversity gains effectively.

In our study, we evaluated how many of the applications contained a basic error in their calculations: we checked to see if the area of the site before and after development added up to the same amount.

We found that the areas did not add up in around one-fifth of all projects. Of these, around half had already been accepted by the local planning authorities. One explanation for this oversight could be that planners were so rushed they did not have time to examine the calculations included with the application.

This suggests we have not yet addressed the serious capacity shortages in the councils – who are ultimately going to be the public bodies overseeing the delivery of Biodiversity Net Gain at local scales. This is clear evidence that further investment in local planning capacity is required.

Environmental markets have the potential to be powerful mechanisms for improving nature, but one of the fundamental features of biodiversity compensation markets is that they deliver biodiversity gains that make up for an equal and opposite loss elsewhere.

This means that every biodiversity unit that is promised by developers in order to secure planning permission, but then not delivered in reality, has legitimised the loss of biodiversity elsewhere.

Making sure that these policies lead to direct, robust gains in the quality of nature is therefore absolutely essential to ensure that the markets-focused approach to drawing private finance into nature recovery in England leaves the environment better, rather than worse, off.