Research team
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Published on 19 March 2024
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Thomas Powell – University of Exeter
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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:
The work will focus on businesses whose operations have a direct or indirect effect on land-use change.
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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.
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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.
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We hope that this work will influence global impact measurement materials, demonstrating how resilience and systems thinking can be incorporated into biodiversity measurement tools.