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SDG: 15 Life on land

Life on land

The Challenges

There is a large mismatch between current climate ambition and climate policy implementation worldwide. In the Brazilian case, this policy gap usually drives the conversion of carbon rich biodiverse native ecosystems (the single largest source of emissions in the country) mainly for agricultural expansion.

Not only is this undermining the health and resilience of the Brazilian economy (for example, because ecosystem conversion compromises biodiversity, climate regulation, water supply and food security), it threatens the country’s international credibility (because it will prevent Brazil from meeting its climate and biodiversity pledges). Moreover, given that Brazil harbours >20% of the world’s species, ongoing ecosystem conversion threatens the integrity of the entire biosphere. Brazilian climate change policies have critical impacts both for Brazil and globally. 

This Sprint considered how to achieve a credible pathway to Net Zero for Brazil. It took place during the run up to the Brazilian general election in October 2022, inspired by the need to push the new administration to provide an ambitious NDC for Brazil, and to provide support on defining the Net Zero strategy, as well as input into COP27 negotiations in November 2022. This Sprint explored the mitigation potential of key nature-based and engineered solutions in Brazil’s net zero pathway under locally meaningful policy scenarios. 

The Solutions

Recommendations for policy makers: 

  • Increase ambition in Brazil’s climate pledges, aligning short and long-term goals.
  • Strengthen existing legislations such as the Forest Code during this decade and go beyond them to avoid large-scale reliance on costly engineered solutions to reach net-zero GHG emissions.
  • Enhance protection and restoration of Brazil’s native ecosystems, i.e. implement nature-based solutions.

The Pathway

This was a six-month science-to-policy Sprint which used Dr Soterroni’s existing land-use model for Brazil combined with another regional integrated assessment model from the Brazilian partner COPPE/UFRJ. These were used to demonstrate how different elements applied to this modeling approach covering all sectors of the economy would create an achievable and affordable net-zero pathway by around 2050. This pathway is regionally sensitive and would contribute to climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience as well as biodiversity conservation. Demonstrating the model and its findings to stakeholders in Brazil and the UK enabled ongoing engagement.

What happened next

Results and policy implications were published in a prestigious paper which is now in the top-ten of most downloaded Global Change Biology articles.

Following this publication Dr Soterroni was seconded into a technical and advisory role in the SINAPSE project (Simulador Nacional de Politicas Setoriais e Emissoes) at the Brazilian Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation. Colleagues from the Ministry confirmed that Dr Soterroni’s research findings contributed to the development of impact projections with detailed representation of national policies in the Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) sector under the SINAPSE MCTI framework. This is the Brazilian government’s official tool for projecting scenarios for the implementation of sectoral public policies and estimating potential greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, to achieve Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets.

Dr Soterroni’s contributions contributed to the development of version 2.0 of the tool, and the next cycle of Brazil’s NDCs to the UNFCCC and the Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy (LT-LEDS).

The Challenges

If the UK is to meet its own and international biodiversity targets, it needs to be able to properly measure the impact of economic development projects on biodiversity. It also needs to be able to deliver social welfare benefits alongside nature restoration, as well as balance trade-offs between commitments to economic development and biodiversity improvements.

At the time the Sprint was planned, HM Treasury had commissioned the Dasgupta Review of the economic case for biodiversity, set bold targets for nature recovery, and were updating their ‘Green Book’ guidance on government investments. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the UK government were gearing up for the launch of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) policy under the Environment Act. However, BNG as formulated at the time had potential to further disadvantage already-disadvantaged groups, and scalable approaches to measuring biodiversity for governmental and industry end-users were unavailable, despite being fundamental to making progress.

This Sprint aimed to identify just and actionable pathways to BNG, supporting an integrated approach to renewing and restoring nature, working directly with HM Treasury and Defra. The Sprint tackled three interlinked issues:

  • How to robustly measure the biodiversity impacts, positive and negative, of business and governmental investments
  • How to reconcile commitments to invest in biodiversity improvement with the economic and social welfare of people most affected by these investments
  • How to deliver sustained, socially just welfare improvements – together with biodiversity gains at the landscape level – using spatial modelling and an exploration of scenarios for development.

The Solutions

  • The Sprint team found evidence that scoring by the Biodiversity Metric may not reflect invertebrate diversity and abundance. This presents a concern in how habitats are valued under BNG.
  • Most early BNG in England has been on-site, but findings from the Sprint team indicated that people have a preference towards off-site offsetting. The Sprint team propose that access should at the very least not be diminished, and BNG should be integrated with access to nature targets where possible.
  • Spatial modelling results showed current BNG offsetting practices are insufficient, and demonstrated that by incorporating ecological and economic information into the targeting of offsets, the offsets can provide a significant contribution to addressing the challenge of biodiversity loss and deliver substantial ecosystem service co-benefits to disadvantaged communities.

The Pathway

Tackling this challenge required layered multi-disciplinary outputs. The Sprint team combined social sciences expertise for local stakeholder engagement, modelled work to assess national, regional and local scales, and completed biodiversity fieldwork. Continuous stakeholder engagement through workshops and webinars lent a transdisciplinary dimension to shaping these layered outputs. The Sprint team also hosted a two day nature Recovery Symposium in March 2023, bringing together researchers working on the science that could underpin planning for nature recovery with decision-makers and practitioners working within government, industry and civil society, to discuss how science could best be deployed to support decisions for nature recovery (further details in this report).

What happened next?

This Sprint developed a best practice ‘Biodiversity Net Gain checklist’ for Local Planning Authorities who evaluate the Biodiversity Gain Plans submitted with planning applications. This was a bottom-up approach to supporting effective policy implementation, as having a strong BNG element within the Local Plan creates a solid foundation for planning and executing effective BNG policy.

DEFRA stated that findings from the research would directly inform policy, and HMT confirmed the research was fundamental to what it was trying to achieve. BBOWT has acted on some of the fieldwork advice relating to BBOWT and farmer-owned land. A webinar presenting the Checklist to the Planning Advisory Service demonstrated how it could reduce to the types of errors from early adopter councils using the Biodiversity Metric. Following engagement with Oxford University’s Estates and Facilities Biodiversity Sub-group, the team submitted a successful SRF bid to work on the Begbroke science district as a living lab, which has incorporated the learning from the checklist and committed to a target of 20% BNG for the site.