The project aims to establish a central hub at Oxford University to harness its considerable potential and expertise, collaborating with national and international partners in ecology, finance, economics, social sciences, human wellbeing, cultural values, and satellite-based monitoring. This hub will serve as a focal point for convening discussions, disseminating crucial issues, fostering collaboration across the university’s diverse disciplines and external partners, and acting as a unified engagement point for dialogue with local, national, and international governments, stakeholders, and collaborators.
Biodiversity coffee mornings at the Oxford Martin School
Fostering synergies and collaborations across Oxford University
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR) and the Biodiversity Network have been actively involved in hosting a weekly co-working space at the Oxford Martin School. This initiative aims to create an open and collaborative environment, providing researchers from various departments an opportunity to meet, network, and explore potential synergies for collaboration. The format allows researchers to present short, informal talks and spark lively discussions among participants.
Over the 2022-23 academic year, the informal presentations covered a wide array of topics, reflecting the diverse research interests within the Biodiversity Network. Topics ranged from Biodiversity Net Gain, the future of cultured meat, and blue carbon to the Oxfordshire Treescapes programme, connectivity modelling, biodiversity surveys, and discussions on chimp programs, butterflies, sustainable healthcare, nature restoration in UK cities, fungal networks, and highlands rewilding. Furthermore, the sessions consistently attracted an average of 45 researchers each week from across various departments including Biology, Geography, Anthropology, Psychiatry, Economics, Politics and English.
The Nature Positive Universities Alliance is a global network of universities prioritising nature restoration.
Nature Positive Universities
The University of Oxford in collaboration with UNEP has launched a global network in order to prompt prioritising nature restoration within the higher education sector; in their operations and supply chains, on campuses and within our cities. This network will form a major contribution to the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Universities have a substantial role to play in moving urgently from degrading nature to restoring it: our students are our future leaders, we create knowledge and thinkers and directly impact the planet as land owners and consumers. Uniting universities for ecosystem restoration has an impact on the wider community and beyond.
To date, approximately 500 universities from 115 different countries have signed up to join the network. We are now working together to set ambitious targets for nature, complete baseline assessments of biodiversity impacts, prioritise actions for nature using the Conservation Hierarchy 4Rs (Refrain, Reduce, Restore & Renew) and use our influence to promote nature recovery within our communities.
Do you want to get involved? For more information: Alliance of Nature-Positive Universities
Supporting conservation by indigenous peoples and local communities
It is widely accepted in global environmental policy that indigenous peoples play a significant role in conservation and climate change mitigation. Biodiversity and ecosystem services on lands governed by indigenous peoples and local communities are declining less rapidly than elsewhere (IPBES, 2019). These lands constitute at least a quarter of the total global land area (IPBES, 2019) and overlap significantly with biodiversity-rich areas.
However, support for indigenous and community-led conservation remains largely ad hoc, local in scale, and insecure. A window of opportunity exists to reform policy and upscale support for these systems, while the new post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework – that sets the agenda for the next 30 years – is under development by the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (UN CBD). Yet, gaining strong support for indigenous-led conservation in the Framework requires evidence on the conditions that enable successful conservation outcomes, an analysis of effective kinds of support, and systematic information on the type and scale of support currently available, to highlight knowledge gaps.
The project will inform global evidence-based policy supporting indigenous and community-led conservation initiatives. We will:
- Produce a systematic map of the contextual factors and ecological outcomes measured or discussed in the literature on forested lands held by IPLCs, and identify gaps and biases in the current knowledge base.
- Develop a database of evidence that can be used to help inform and direct future research efforts.
The broad scope of this study provides the opportunity to clarify and strengthen knowledge on the contribution IPLCs make to conservation, which in turn is vital for informing forest and conservation-related policy, research and investment.
