News

Seagrass protection and restoration would provide valuable carbon removal and storage, alongside substantial benefits for people and nature, but more needs to be done to encourage this through policy and nature financing.

New research has been published this week which finds that Brazil needs to centre nature-based solutions and deforestation in order to reach its net zero targets.

In September, Nat Duffus presented a quick guide for planners and developers on assessing biodiversity net gain plans to the University of Oxford Biodiversity Sub-Group. This guide was produced by the Agile Initiative sprint “How do we account for biodiversity?”

Highlands Rewilding has released a comprehensive "Engagement Roadmap". This roadmap, developed in collaboration with researchers from the Agile Initiative, presents a strategy for effective public and stakeholder engagement in rewilding and nature-based solutions projects.

Agile started with six sprint projects in 2022, and will fund more from the research grant as the Initiative evolves. But how should we decide what new projects to fund? How do we identify the most pressing questions that Oxford-based researchers can offer solutions to, rapidly? In June 2023 we launched a call for new sprint ideas.

The Agile Initiative ran a summer school called “Connecting environmental research with policy: a pathway to real-world impacts” in July 2023. It set the scene of UK local, regional and national environmental policy and legislature, asking the invited speakers and attendees: how do we get research into policy?

In a collaboration between the Nature-based Solutions Sprint, RSPB and WWF, written evidence has now been submitted as part of the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) to the EAC Inquiry on Heat Resilience and Sustainable Cooling.

The MPEC 80 outcomes are a step in the right direction, underlining that continued research efforts, such as this Agile Sprint, are required to inform ongoing dialogues around new policies to achieve the new targets set.