UCL People and Nature Lab Seminar

SPEAKER: Jon Davies (RSK Wilding)

TALK TITLE: “BNG and the EIP: Biodiversity in the corporate and academic worlds – never the twain shall meet?”

In Person: UCL East Marshgate, Room 635 - Report to reception at 13.50 Visit us | UCL East - UCL – University College London

Online over Teams: email [email protected] to receive online joining instructions

ABSTRACT: The aim of this talk is to consider the contrasting approaches to addressing the biodiversity crisis in the planning sector and the wider Government policy environment. Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is a relatively new (and progressive) requirement for developers in England, aimed at ensuring that development delivers a positive legacy for biodiversity. Jon will explain how it works, and how his team intends to use strategic biodiversity offsetting through BNG to deliver meaningful habitat restoration at scale. BNG is essentially the private sector equivalent of the ‘public money for public goods’ as provided to landowners through agri-environment schemes such as ELMS (the Environmental Land Management Scheme), and this talk will compare and contrast the two approaches.

BNG sits alongside the Government’s Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP), which has lots of targets but less in the way of actual proposed action; indeed BNG will make significant contributions to its nature restoration objectives. Whilst protected species issues are dealt with separately in the planning system, the focus of BNG is very much on habitats, so what contribution might it make to the species targets within the EIP? BNG is already expensive for developers, so any long-term monitoring of its contribution to species recovery (both diversity and abundance) will need to be smart and cost effective; is this where academia can help?

BIO: Jon began his career carrying out research into tropical beetle diversity at the Natural History Museum in London, working in places such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Namibia, Tanzania and Laos. He moved sideways into ecological consultancy in 1996, and has been there ever since, assessing the ecological impacts of development and designing mitigation measures. He led the Arcadis Ecology Team for four years before joining RSK Biocensus and setting up RSK Wilding. This team, now 25-strong, has a focus on delivering habitat restoration, especially through Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) a mandatory requirement for developers in the UK. He will be retiring at the end of March,

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