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How businesses affect nature resilience – Integrating biodiversity and ecosystem resilience into nature impact analysis

How businesses affect nature resilience – Integrating biodiversity and ecosystem resilience into nature impact analysis

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Published on 19 March 2024

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Research team

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Will Bugg – University of Exeter

A profile picture of Co-Lead Tim Lenton

Tim Lenton – University of Exeter

A business profile image of Oshadee Siyaguna

Oshadee Siyaguna – J O Hambro (Regnan)

A profile picture of Co Lead Gail Whiteman

Gail Whiteman – University of Exeter

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Thomas Powell – University of Exeter

A business profile image of Jesse Ambrams

Jesse Abrams – University of Exeter

Partnership

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Aims

Businesses and financial investors are paying more attention to how their supply chains and global operations affect biodiversity. Current biodiversity impact tools tend not to incorporate systems thinking or resilience, meaning we risk looking at problems in isolation when they are in fact interconnected.   

Co-funded by J O Hambro Capital Management, this research aims to address this by answering the following questions:  

  • What is the current state of global ecological resilience? 
  • What are businesses currently doing, and what more can businesses do, to enhance their impact on the resilience of biodiversity and ecosystems? 
  • How do businesses affect biodiversity and ecosystems resilience by contributing to changes in land use? 
  • How can businesses manage their impacts to avoid negative ‘tipping points’ and instead tip for positive change? 

The work will focus on businesses whose operations have a direct or indirect effect on land-use change. 

Key Concepts

Resilience: the speed at which a system returns to its original state following a perturbation.

Tipping point: when a small change makes a big difference to a system because it triggers processes within the system that amplify change – potentially irreversibly – tipping the system into an alternate state.

Systems thinking: an approach to problem-solving that looks at systems as a whole, and the complex interactions and connections within that system, rather than reducing it to its component parts.

Approach

We will use existing global datasets to create an ecosystem and biodiversity resilience metric that quantifies nature resilience globally. The work will layer different indicators together to help businesses and investors understand their overall impact in different parts of the world.  

Qualitative research will explore businesses’ perceptions of biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, why it is important and what they can do to enhance it. Finally, we will examine case study examples of positive and negative tipping points where business activity has affected land-use change and show how the metric can be used by businesses to measure their impacts on ecological resilience. 

“J O Hambro, through our resilient systems brand Regnan, is excited to be partnering with RENEW on finding solutions to the renewal of biodiversity.  Human existence is intimately interwoven with the natural world, which it has been reshaping for millennia. Healthy and resilient biodiversity is essential to underpin the wellbeing of our economic system and the social constructs that is supports.” 

 

– Andrew Parry, Head of Investments at J O Hambro Capital Management

Impact

We hope that this work will influence global impact measurement materials, demonstrating how resilience and systems thinking can be incorporated into biodiversity measurement tools.    


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renew@exeter.ac.uk