Access a range of published articles and resources from RENEW foci such as biodiversity renewal missions, personalised ecology and collaboration in practice. We’ll be updating this section as RENEW evolves, please check back for updates.
Access a range of published articles and resources from RENEW foci such as biodiversity renewal missions, personalised ecology and collaboration in practice. We’ll be updating this section as RENEW evolves, please check back for updates.
Summary
Humankind is facing both climate and biodiversity crises. This article proposes the foundations of a scheme that offers tradable credits for combined aboveground and soil carbon and biodiversity. Multidiversity—as estimated based on high-throughput molecular identification of soil meiofauna, fungi, bacteria, protists, plants and other organisms shedding DNA into soil, complemented by acoustic and video analyses of aboveground macrobiota—offers a cost-effective method that captures much of the terrestrial biodiversity. Such a voluntary crediting system would increase the quality of carbon projects and contribute funding for delivering the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Tedersoo L, Sepping J, Morgunov A S, Kiik M, Esop K, Rosenvald R, Hardwick K, Breman E, Purdon R, Groom B, Venmans F, Kiers E T and Antonelli A (2023).
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Summary
Reducing global forest losses is essential to mitigate climate change and its associated social costs. Multiple market and non-market factors can enhance or reduce forest loss. Here, to understand the role of non-market factors (for example, policies, climate anomalies or conflicts), we can compare observed trends to a reference (expected) scenario that excludes non-market factors. We define an expected scenario by simulating land-use decisions solely driven by market prices, productivities and presumably plausible decision-making. The land-use allocation model considers economic profits and uncertainties as incentives for forest conversion. We compare reference forest losses in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia (2000–2019) with observed forest losses and assign differences from non-market factors. Our results suggest that non-market factors temporarily lead to lower-than-expected forest losses summing to 11.1 million hectares, but also to phases with higher-than-expected forest losses of 11.3 million hectares. Phases with lower-than-expected forest losses occurred earlier than those with higher-than-expected forest losses. The damages avoided by delaying emissions that would otherwise have occurred represent a social value of US$61.6 billion (as of the year 2000). This result shows the economic importance of forest conservation efforts in the tropics, even if reduced forest loss might be temporary and reverse over time.
Knoke T, Hanley, N, Roman-Cuesta R M, Groom B and Venmans F (2023)
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Summary
The estimated value to society from climate change mitigation is highly sensitive to the long-term social discount rate. Governmental discounting guidance has almost exclusively been influenced by economists, although it is not clear that they possess any special expertise on intergenerational ethics. Here, by contrast, we report the views of philosophers, who are the most trained in ethical matters. We show that, as a group, these experts offer strong support for a real social discount rate of 2%, a value that is also predominantly backed by economists. We find multidisciplinary support for climate policy paths in line with the United Nations climate targets when views on discounting determinants are applied within a recent update of the DICE integrated assessment model. However, this apparent agreement hides important differences in views on how the ethics of intergenerational welfare can be better incorporated into climate policy evaluation.
Nesje F, Drupp M, Freeman M C, and Groom B (2023).
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Summary
It is unclear how much carbon should be stored in temporary and risky offsets to compensate one ton of CO2 emissions. Here we cast the social value of an offset (SVO), measured in terms of economic damages avoided, as a well-defined fraction of the social cost of carbon reflecting offset duration, and risks of non-additionality and failure. The SVO reflects the value of temporary storage, and overcomes shortcomings in the climate science and economics of previous contributions1,2,3,4. The SVO is policy relevant. An efficient net-zero policy will consist of offsets if their SVO/cost ratio exceeds the benefit/cost ratio of alternatives. The SVO yields an indicator of the equivalence of offsets to permanent carbon storage measured by the ratio of the SVO to the social cost of carbon. We provide a matrix of equivalence factors for different risks, permanence and climate scenarios. Estimation yields a rule of thumb: one offset sequestering one ton for 50 years is equivalent to between 0.33 and 0.5 tons permanently locked away. Equivalence offers a means of replacing perpetual offset contracts by simpler, easy to monitor short-term contracts, has applications to carbon life cycle analysis5 and the valuation of carbon debts6, and can be the basis of comparing offsets of different qualities in the voluntary and compliance markets.
Groom B and Venmans F (2023).
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Summary
The future of biodiversity lies not just in the strategies and mechanisms by which ecosystems and species are practically best protected from anthropogenic pressures. It lies also, and perhaps foremost, in the many billions of decisions that people make that, intentionally or otherwise, shape their impact on nature and
the conservation policies and interventions that are implemented. Personalised ecology – the set of direct sensory interactions that each of us has with nature – is one important consideration in understanding the decisions that people make. Indeed, it has long been argued that people’s personalised ecologies have powerful implications, as captured in such concepts as biophilia, extinction of experience, and shifting baselines. In this paper we briefly review the connections between personalised ecology and the future of biodiversity, and the ways in which personalised ecologies might usefully be enhanced to improve that future.
Gaston, K.J., Phillips, B.B. & Soga, M. 2023. Personalised ecology and the future of biodiversity. Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, in press.
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Summary
Balmford A, Swinfield T, Groom B et al. (2023). ‘Credit credibility threatens forests’. Science, 380 (6644), pp. 466-467.
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Summary
The RENEW project has its foundations in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, that is, research reaching across disciplines and beyond academia. This document aims to facilitate consideration of, and guide, collaborative practices within and around RENEW. It will act as a ‘living’ resource for RENEW members and partners to use and feed into; this is the first of several planned versions that the Collaboration in Practice team will produce through the project lifetime. In addition to internal versions, at a later stage, drawing on collective learning in RENEW, we will develop this into a publicly available manifesto for collaborative practice, building on other manifestos about wildlife conservation, and interdisciplinarity across natural and social sciences. This first iteration provides several prompts and working recommendations, based on our review of the academic literature and ‘best practice’ reports on interdisciplinarity, co-production, and other modes of research that bring together people from diverse disciplines and sectors. It is a starting point, so please contact the authors – the Collaboration in Practice (X3) team of RENEW (https://renewbiodiversity.org.uk/) if you have feedback, additions, amendments, or related ideas.
Cassidy, A., Kershaw, E. H., & Molyneux-Hodgson, S. (2023). A ‘living’ guide to fostering collaborative practices in RENEW. Iteration 1.0 (March 2023). University of Exeter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/f3qa-jp96
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Summary
People can express irrational fears and disgust responses towards certain wild organisms. This so-called ‘biophobia’ can be useful and indeed necessary in some circumstances. Biophobia can, however, also lead to excessive distress and anxiety which, in turn, can result in people avoiding interactions with nature. Here, we highlight concern that this reduction in interactions with nature might lead to progressive increases in biophobia, entrenching it more in individuals and across society. We propose the ‘vicious cycle of biophobia’, a concept that encapsulates how excessive aversion towards nature might emerge and grow in society. The vicious cycle of biophobia risks accelerating the extinction of experience, leading to long-term adverse consequences for the conservation of biodiversity.
Soga, M., Gaston, K.J., Fukano, Y. and Evans, M.J. (2023). The vicious cycle of biophobia. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.12.012.
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Summary
The connection that individuals have with nature impacts their well-being and their support for pro-nature policies. While it is generally believed that the connection between humans and nature is decreasing, the extent of this trend is uncertain. Here, we present a global analysis of the temporal changes in people’s psychological and physical connections to nature. Using a systematic review protocol, we identified 71 articles consisting of 100 case studies. Most of these studies used cross-sectional, rather than longitudinal, approaches, which examine the connection to nature among people of different ages. The literature we reviewed indicates that there has been a decline in human connection to nature over time. However, the magnitude of changes in nature connection varied by geographic and socio-economic settings, with some studies showing an increasing trend. These findings suggest that there are opportunities to limit and reverse ongoing disconnection of humans from nature where it does occur.
Soga, M. and Gaston, K.J. (2023). Global synthesis reveals heterogeneous changes in connection of humans to nature. One Earth, 6(2), pp.131–138. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.01.007.
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CBI Foreword
In the past decade, a seismic shift has taken place in the global political economy. Protecting our planet has become a key priority for governments and businesses across every country and, while it can be argued that this step change has come much too late, it is nonetheless encouraging to see this issue is increasingly central to business strategy. So far, this has primarily involved a focus on decarbonisation in line with the Paris Agreement and the 2030 net zero targets for the UK, however, we continue to learn more and more about the other ways we need to protect our planet…
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Summary
The human health benefits of direct sensory interactions with nature (hereafter direct human–nature interactions) are increasingly recognised. However, these interactions can also have various negative health and well-being impacts on people, some of which may be severe. Compared to positive ones, there have been relatively little investigation of such negative direct human–nature interactions beyond the medical literature, and what has been done is widely scattered across disciplines…
Soga, M. and Gaston, K.J. (2022). The dark side of nature experience: Typology, dynamics and implications of negative sensory interactions with nature. People and Nature. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10383.
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