- This event has passed.
NETGAIN Seminar: Some overlooked consequences of Biodiversity Net Gain for social justice and democracy with Kiera Chapman
This is a hybrid seminar. Please either note your attendance in-person to the NETGAIN team, or register to attend online.
The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe. The causes are complex, but ecological loss caused by urbanisation is a factor. Biodiversity Net Gain is a new approach to mitigating these harms: it quantifies the ‘biodiversity units’ provided by habitats on a piece of land before it is developed, and ensures that the these are increased by 10%, either with onsite landscaping or by purchasing units from offsite projects to restore nature.
A lot of the research on Biodiversity Net Gain treats it as a standalone policy grounded in ecological science. But its roots lie within neoclassical economics, in an approach that seeks to ‘price in’ pollution. Furthermore, it sits within a wider planning system that makes decisions by a very different rationale of weighing and balancing different interests. This seminar will set net gain policy in the context of the UK planning system and will explore the contradictions between the logics of science, economics, and spatial decisionmaking. In the process, it will show that there are significant yet overlooked implications of net gain policy for local democracy and social justice.
Dr Kiera Chapman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the University of Oxford. They are an interdisciplinary scholar with their work ranging across arts and humanities, social science, and ecological science to explore how natural and urban spaces are produced and contested, and why this matters socially, economically, politically, and in terms of human and more-than-human health and co-flourishing.
About the NETGAIN Seminar Series
This monthly seminar series is designed to support the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers by providing NETGAIN PhD students with perspectives from ecology, economics, social science, law, and environmental policy. The series introduces the diverse disciplinary lenses needed to understand and shape Net Gain frameworks and emerging nature markets.
While aimed primarily at NETGAIN PhD students, the seminars are equally valuable to academics, practitioners, policymakers, and industry partners working at the interface of nature recovery, land-use planning, carbon and biodiversity markets, and environmental governance.
The seminar series also plays a complementary role in the development of the NETGAIN eBook – a living, multidisciplinary repository that responds to rapid advances in nature-positive policy, practice, and research. The seminars contribute to this larger initiative by exposing students and attendees to foundational concepts, real-world challenges, and cutting-edge methods that are essential for developing socially equitable, ecologically robust, and economically sound Net Gain approaches.