Biodiversity

Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the RENEW programme is a collaboration between the University of Exeter and the National Trust, and has been co-designed and developed with over 30 partners from a diverse range of sectors. RENEW is led by Professors Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova, Kevin Gaston, and Catriona McKinnon from the University of Exeter, and Professor Rosie Hails from the National Trust.

Ben Groom’s work on the RENEW programme involves working with business and finance decision-makers to embed biodiversity renewal in finance and business activities. It addresses the barriers and enablers to nature-positive business actions and helps identify the best approaches and tools to embed rigorous scientific evidence into corresponding decision-making processes, co-creating with partners a biodiversity intelligence capability that accelerates integration of biodiversity renewal into business and investment decisions.

We are in a biodiversity crisis. A million species of plants and animals are threatened with global extinction, and wildlife populations across much of the planet have been dramatically reduced. This is of profound concern because biodiversity underpins human existence. RENEW is working, with a sense of urgency, to reshape understanding and action on biodiversity renewal across scales, creating knowledge, and influencing national institutions, communities and individuals. Our focus is on a ‘people-in-nature’ approach, reflecting the two-way, dynamic relations between people and nature and the need to develop a relational approach to renew our life-support systems.

RENEW is focused on a set of key challenges: how popular support for biodiversity renewal can be harnessed; how populations that are disengaged, disadvantaged, or disconnected from nature can benefit from inclusion in solutions development; how renewal activities can be designed and delivered by diverse sets of land-managers and interest groups; and how biodiversity renewal can most effectively be embedded in finance and business activities.