Nature Positive: fact or fiction?

Wadham Fellow in Biology, Joseph Bull addressed this question for the Leverhulme Nature Recovery Centre on January 27. Organised by the Oxford Biodiversity Network, the talk was also live streamed and is now available on YouTube.

Joe describes the talk:

"Biodiversity loss is one of the great global challenges of our time. If we are ever to address and ultimately reverse biodiversity loss, we must face the difficult truth that amongst its most substantial drivers are consumption and trade. As such, to arrest declines in biodiversity, we may all have to change the way we live and do business.

The idea of ‘Nature Positive’ builds on decades of scientific work and hard-fought environmental policy gains, and suggests that we can: (a) quantify the direct and indirect impacts of organisations on biodiversity; (b) substantially reduce those impacts; and, (c) reverse them, to the extent that we begin to see global biodiversity recovery.

It is a great narrative – but is it fundamentally a fiction, or do the facts suggest it might actually be possible? In this talk, I explore this question empirically, from the perspective of working right on the boundary between academia and industry."

Joe added, "This is potentially of interest to Wadham students/alumni not only as it touches upon major contemporary global environmental challenges (biodiversity loss and climate change), but also as it is the kind of thinking that may end up being applied in the context of running Wadham (and other colleges) itself!"