Biodiversity metrics and renewable energy PhD

I’m starting a PhD!
I’ll be looking at biodiversity metrics / ecosystem services, in relation to renewable energy, largely bioenergy.

What does this mean?
I have an opportunity to delve more into the impacts renewable energy might have on the biodiversity of the UK and further afield – both positive and negative impacts, that is – and perhaps be able to continue to influence in some way how renewable energy is produced. I’ve worked on biodiversity on solar farms for the past eight years and look forward to expanding into other types of renewable energy. There’s really an opportunity to build nature value in, in big and small ways.

I have an opportunity, too, to look at and influence the development of biodiversity metrics and ultimately, things like Natural Capital, ecosystem services assessments, and other ways that nature and the destruction of it are being monetised. The reason for this monetisation is to curb the impacts of capitalism on the natural world – the idea, that by having to pay for impacts of removing natural habitats, causing things like pollution, or using chemicals that kill, we are both protecting what is left of the natural world and creating a turning point where we bring back nature to degraded places, too.

Eventually, we will no longer need to monetise nature because we will find ways to live in harmony with the natural world once more. As things stand, it is a way to bring the importance of nature to the forefront of capitalism, making it for the first time in history more cost effective, in the immediate future, to care for the natural world than to destroy it. In the long-term, it is of course most cost effective to care for the natural world, as businesses the world over are realising, and are designing into their strategies.