Natalie Duffus recognised on the ENDS POWER LIST 2025

Congratulations to Natalie Duffus for being recognised on the 2024 the Ends Power List as an unsung hero!

Asked to qualify Natalie Duffus’s contribution to the UK environmental sector, a nominator describes her as “a powerhouse in increasing public awareness around the ecological impacts of biodiversity net gain, and how to improve the policy both economically and ecologically”.

As a PhD researcher with the Department of Biology and School of Geography at the University of Oxford, Duffus has published academic papers setting out issues with the scientific integrity of the biodiversity net gain (BNG) metric, proposing ways for improvement.

She has also extensively written about insect conservation in the UK – an area she began researching while reading conservation biology at the University of Aberdeen. Studies she coauthored on this front include a paper on leveraging BNG to address invertebrate decline in England, and another claiming that metrics based on habitat area and condition are “poor proxies” for invertebrate biodiversity.

“She is an amazing advocate for invertebrate life everywhere and [has played] an important role in improving representation, as a young Scottish woman prominent in the entomology community,” a nominator says.

Duffus is said by her supporters to have “deeply influenced” UK conservation. They point to the “key role” she played when interning for Natural Resources Wales and assembling evidence for the regulator’s approach to integrating biodiversity and planning, or the fact that Duffus was the only academic to respond to the biodiversity metric consultation in Scotland.

Praise is also made of Duffus’s public-facing work, with appearances on BBC, Talk TV and others. She was recently one of four co-signatories of an opinion piece, published in ENDS, which urged for a “pause” on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill’s nature reforms.