Financing Biodiversity
Flagship 3 tackles the challenge of financing biodiversity conservation with integrity at a large scale. It will promote best practices and coordination in biodiversity finance, and will champion the importance of between-site biodiversity. This will ensure that conservation is effective, interconnected, and extends beyond individual sites. Key stakeholders, including the Biodiversity Credit Alliance, will help to deliver a theory of change for the scaling-up of biodiversity finance. The goal is to define what high-integrity finance for biodiversity should look like, and to identify the barriers and opportunities that exist.
Flagship Leader: Professor Richard Field
Richard is Professor of Biodiversity Science within the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. He is also Editor in Chief of the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. His research spans biogeography, macroecology, and plant ecology, with a central focus on explaining and mapping spatial patterns of biodiversity and the processes that structure ecological communities under global change. Richard’s group develops quantitative models and syntheses to assess climate change impacts on biodiversity, evaluate conservation priorities, and inform nature positive investment. He collaborates internationally on trait–environment relationships, island biogeography, and methods to quantify biodiversity gains. He has published widely in leading journals and supervises a diverse cohort of postgraduate researchers. Richard also provides editorial leadership for a flagship journal in the field and contributes expert advice to initiatives that seek robust standards for measuring nature outcomes. At Nottingham he teaches biogeography and conservation science and is active in public engagement that communicates macroecology to policy and practice. His work combines rigorous ecological theory with applied analytics to support decisions that deliver measurable benefits for biodiversity.