"The natural capital approach: ecological and economic perspectives" with Dame Georgina Mace & Prof Ian Bateman

Past Event

Date
15 November 2018, 5:00pm - 6:00pm

Location
Lecture Theatre, Oxford Martin School
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

Adobe Stock radiokafka Farm Kyrgyzstan
© Adobe stock/ radiokafka

This is a joint lecture with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School

Governments, businesses and NGOs are developing new metrics and tools to value and measure social, environmental and economic change in the context of Sustainable Development Goals and planetary health. Current approaches face limitations in addressing temporal and spatial dimensions of natural capital value.

This talk will address emerging methodologies to measure natural capital and enable us to assess and measure ecological services and benefits more fully in economic analysis. The speakers will bring perspectives from the ecological science and economics.


About the speakers

Professor Georgina Mace is Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems, and Head of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London.

Prior to joining UCL in 2012, she was Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London from 2006, and before that she worked at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, first as a research fellow (1991 – 2000), and latterly as Director of Science (2000 – 2006).

Her research concerns measuring the trends and consequences of biodiversity loss and change with a particular focus on the science and policy interface for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.

Working with IUCN she led the process to develop, test and document criteria for listing species on IUCN’s Red List of threatened species. Subsequently she worked on the biodiversity elements of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and contributed to the technical development of measures for the CBD 2010 biodiversity target. She worked on the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (2011) and the IPCC WG2 report (2014). In 2014 she chaired a Royal Society science policy report on “Resilience to extreme weather”. Currently she is a member of the UK Government’s Natural Capital Committee (2012-2015).

She was awarded a CBE in 2007, elected FRS in 2002, and was the 2007 winner of the International Cosmos prize. She has been President of the British Ecological Society (2011-2013), President of the Society for Conservation Biology (2007-2009) and the last Chair of the international programme on biodiversity science DIVERSITAS (2012-2014) which merged into the Future Earth Programme in 2014. Furthermore, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours.

She is currently a member of NERC Council and the Council of the Royal Society.

Ian J. Bateman is a member of the secretariat of the The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health; Professor of Environmental Economics and Director of the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP) at the University of Exeter, UK. He also holds professorships in Australia and New Zealand and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award (awarded 2011 for five years) and is a Member of the H.M. Treasury and UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Natural Capital Committee. He is also a Member of the Board of Directors of the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the Environment Agency Long-Term Investment Scenarios Development Group and the NERC Strategic Programme Advisory Group.

Ian was formerly the only economist on the Defra Science Advisory Council and Head of Economics for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and led the economics component of the second phase of the UK-NEA. He has been Principle Investigator of over 70 major research grants bringing together public and private sector funding in excess of £30 million. Ongoing grants include leadership of the NERC South West Partnership for Environment and Economic Prosperity (SWEEP), which unites multiple business and policy decision-makers with research experts.

Ian has been or is advisor or consultant to: Defra, DfT, DoH, NICE, OECD and numerous other bodies. He is also the Editor of the leading journal Environmental and Resource Economics. His main research interests revolve around the issue of ensuring sustainable well-being through the integration of natural and social science knowledge. He has particular skills in the fields of quantitative analysis as well as the valuation of non-market benefits and costs.

Ian has written over 130 peer-reviewed journal papers and a large number of book chapters and books. He has written or edited more than a dozen books and over 100 chapters in books. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2013 for services to environmental science and policy.