Over half of global gross domestic product is dependent on nature, yet the past decades have seen unprecedented damage to ecosystems and declines in biodiversity due to adverse human activities. Financial institutions (FIs) can play an important role in securing a nature-positive future. Decisions by FIs over capital allocation and risk pricing influence structural shifts in the real economy that have profound impacts on nature. Today, opportunities to align nature and capital in ways that benefit people, nature and FIs are missed because these impacts are not accounted for. Our aim is to contribute the foundational networks, upskilling of researchers and robust, standardised methods and tools needed to integrate biodiversity and nature into financial decision making. Our focus is the scenarios used by FIs to influence risk pricing and investment decisions, alongside the relevant and suitable data and tools needed for scenario analysis, such as asset-level data and tools to assess nature-related financial risks. A further novel aspect of our proposal is the on integrated nature-climate scenarios. Scenarios and analytics for use by FIs must consider biodiversity and climate in an integrated way. Biodiversity and climate are often treated in siloes, driving potential systemic risks. Important interactions and feedbacks are not accounted for, leading to underestimation of risks and critical tipping points. An important innovation in our proposal is to bring together the IPBES, IPCC and FI scenarios communities, leaders of whom are partners to this project, to address this gap. Integrating nature and climate requires new science; our proposal is to develop the networks and co-design and pilot the frameworks to achieve this - i.e. the foundational common framework and language needed to close the gap. This will create the foundation to Phase 2 that will generate the new datasets and toolkits needed. Here we particularly target scenarios and analytics for use by Central Banks and Supervisors (CB&Ss). This is because CB&Ss are important catalysts of wider action by FIs. Supervisory expectations and regulations, e.g. disclosure, capital requirements and stress-testing, set the rules by which FIs operate, while monetary policies shape the playing field, together having a major influence on global capital flows and so nature. In developing this proposal, we have consulted with the leading CB&Ss and policy makers (e.g. Defra, HMT) that are shaping this agenda and leading work on scenarios, all of whom have agreed to join the project as project partners. This includes the European Central Bank, the Banque de France, De Nederlandsche Bank, the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors (CB&Ss) for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), and the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Phase 1 of the project will deliver several important building blocks. Firstly, it will establish and operationalise the multi-disciplinary nature-climate-finance network. Secondly, it will co-develop the framework and guidance to generate the nature-climate scenarios and analytics, alongside syntheses of evidence and gap analyses. Finally, it will deliver a demonstrator application to a CB&S use case in stress testing nature-related risks. We will capture lessons learnt through this project to inform Phase 2, as well as share them to inform the development of the wider NERC Nature Positive Futures (NPF) programme. Our goal is that the network and the analytical framework developed will ultimately catalyse shifts in financial flows that reduce systemic risks and are aligned with a nature-positive future. Through consultations, we have understood the key milestones and actors to achieve this and shaped the project accordingly. We will work closely with our project partners, and link to UKCGFI, to ensure our outputs feed into the key processes, as well as collaborate with and support the wider NPF programme goals.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The concept of 'development corridors' is increasingly used to support economic growth in Africa, driven by international as well as national interests. Development corridors have tremendous development potential yet they face significant challenges. These include uneven development impacts, traversing so-called "underutilised" lands that are generally already populated and managed, and vulnerability to climate change. Such challenges result in a lack of appropriate research capacity in the region. This proposal aims to addresses these challenges through engagement with decision makers and by developing relevant capacity within research institutions and researchers in eastern Africa, China and the UK. The research is targeted to generate decision-relevant evidence and feed it into key decision making processes in order to improve the sustainable development outcomes of investments in development corridors. The proposal is focused on corridors in eastern Africa, particularly the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) and the Lamu Port and Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) in Kenya. The consortium is led by the United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), who would be contracted as 'WCMC', and comprises five universities (Cambridge, London School of Economics, Nairobi, Sokoine University of Agriculture and York) and three boundary agents (World-Wide Fund for Nature (Tanzania), African Conservation Centre (ACC) and the China National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (NCSC) of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). The work is structured around three outcomes and six Work Packages, fully integrating research and capacity development, and significant policy engagement and outreach.

This project will examine the role of ecosystem services in the conceptual understanding of poverty, by analysing the extent to which ecosystem services can be seen as a missing dimension of the way in which multidimensional poverty is defined. In order to do so, it will undertake a review of the ways in which wellbeing and poverty are understood, and the extent to which elements of the natural environment contribute to improving wellbeing and reducing poverty. It will focus on the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which defines poverty as a person's inability to meet the minimum internationally comparable standards in the core elements that are necessary for human flourishing, and will examine the extent to which access to ecosystem services can be conceptually included as one of the core elements that define wellbeing. The project's conceptual and theoretical contributions will focus primarily on identifying the philosophical and scientific arguments that suggest that lack of access to nature and ecosystem services reduces the capability of people to achieve their potential. In doing so, the project will engage with recent literature which has been assessing the subjective elements that make up the definitions of poverty and wellbeing, and the extent to which these are influenced by the ways in which humans interact with nature. Having established the broader conceptual framework for incorporating ecosystem services into multi-dimensional poverty, the project will operationalise this understanding by examining the extent to which existing methods for collecting poverty and environment data can be made more compatible. These include data collected at national level, spatially explicit data on the incidence of poverty and the occurence of ecosystem services, as well as detailed household-level survey instruments which seek to understand multidimensional wellbeing as well the use of, and dependence on, flows from natural ecosystems. The project will test these ideas in a small selection of case study locations, building on the existing work that is being undertaken by the project partners at global, national and sub-national scales. The partners bring a unique set of resources and skills into productive conversation with each other, connecting knowledge communities that tend not to be well integrated with each other. UNEP WCMC is the leading repository of global environmental data, but has tended not to have an explicit mandate to understand the poverty implications of these data; OPHI is at the cutting-edge of work that seeks to define and measure poverty, but has tended to pay relatively limited attention to the role of the environment in its definition of multidimensional poverty. The University of Cambridge provides a unique bridge across these communities, as well as to the wider portfolio of existing ESPA research. By making these connections, the project hopes to have an impact on the ways in which poverty and human wellbeing are understood and defined, especially in relation to ongoing discussions about the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Overall, therefore, the project will make contributions at three distinct, inter-connected levels: (i) conceptual, in shifting the ways in which the relationship between ecosystem services and wellbeing and poverty is defined and understood; (ii) methodological, in developing techniques and protocols that allow the unification of hitherto distinct approaches to measuring and understanding poverty and environmental sustainability; and (iii) at the policy level, by contributing to the definition of international goals for human society in the twenty-first century, and associated targets to guide decision makers operating across a variety of spatial and temporal scales.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.