New £10 million Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery in Oxford
The Leverhulme Trust has awarded £10 million to a new Oxford nature recovery centre – one of three UK centres established with a hotly-contested Leverhulme Trust 2021 award.
The centre, led by Professor Yadvinder Malhi of the School of Geography and the Environment and co-directors including NbSI’s own Professor Nathalie Seddon, will also receive £5 million in co-funding from the University of Oxford, which will support fundamental cross-disciplinary research.
The centre will bring together several Oxford University groups and departments, including the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, the School of Geography and the Environment, the Environmental Change Institute, the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment, and the Departments of Biology, Psychiatry, Economics, Anthropology and Statistics.
The Oxford centre will implement a range of studies on nature recovery, covering ecological, social, cultural and health and wellbeing dimensions, and will utilize technology to deliver and monitor progress of nature recovery at scale. These studies will then be used as a basis for scenario development of nature recovery in key landscapes, as well as for investigating innovative methods of funding nature recovery work in collaboration with financial partners.
The centre will establish flagship long-term nature recovery experiments in the local Oxford landscape as well as case study landscapes locally and internationally, including the Scottish Highlands, Ghana, Malaysia and Peru, with expansion to further sites as the centre develops.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery will bring together multi-disciplinary teams, state-of-the-art technologies and modelling, and connections on local and global scales through the food and trade system to addressing the ecological, social, cultural and economic dimensions of nature recovery in a single framework
Read more in the announcements from the University of Oxford and The Leverhulme Trust.
