Towards Predicting the Biodiversity Impacts of Environmental Change

Description

In November 2022, JNCC and the Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies published a joint statement on Nature Recovery. This set out the need to embed nature recovery in UK decision-making and to deliver impactful policies that incentivise and drive public and private investment in the protection and recovery of the UK’s nature through all our activities. As envisaged in that statement, the global community has now committed to the ambitious Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In May 2023, JNCC published a new strategy: Together for Nature (https://jncc.gov.uk/about-jncc/our-strategy); this further set out the need to advise on the design of new policies and actions to progress nature recovery. However, despite a strong evidence base on biodiversity in the UK, we currently lack the technical capability to use this evidence to model the impact of potential environmental, societal and policy trajectories on biodiversity. Lot 1: JNCC is seeking research partners to help develop a modelling framework for predicting the impact on biodiversity from changes to the environment over the next 25-50 years across the whole of the UK. This framework must identify and be responsive to critical drivers of biodiversity change, including climate, society, land use and land management. The framework must allow for different scenarios to be developed and run to assess how different societal and policy choices could affect biodiversity. The framework should be designed to model a range of different biodiversity measures including measures of both species and habitat outcomes to provide a holistic view of biodiversity change. Development of this modelling framework is likely to be a long-term endeavour. During the course of this contractual period, both the initial development and longer term planning