About the project

This project will ask: are new planning policies to protect biodiversity improving outcomes for biodiversity on the ground? And are there areas where the system could be improved to ensure better ecological outcomes? 

We will compare and contrast England and Scotland. England has seen the recent introduction of Biodiversity Net Gain, whereas in Scotland, policy protections for biodiversity do not yet involve a metric. 

These questions are particularly important right now, for two reasons. 

First, the government recently introduced Biodiversity Net Gain in England. Developers have to assess the biodiversity value of a site before development, and formulate a strategy to deliver a 10% net gain by improving habitats. The policy is of global significance, and policymakers in other countries are looking to see whether it works as a way of mitigating biodiversity loss. Our project will provide valuable evidence as to whether it is improving outcomes or not. 

Second, the government has announced that it is reforming the planning system to deliver ambitious housebuilding targets. If policy protections for nature are not functioning to improve outcomes for nature on the ground, the results of this ‘building boom’ could be devastating. 

What will we be doing?

The social and ecological dimensions of land use decisions tend to be treated as separate areas of expertise in both planning practice and academia. This project challenges these disciplinary silos, bringing together academics from the Schools of Geography and Planning, Architecture and Landscape, and Biosciences at the University of Sheffield, and the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. 

Our study addresses the following questions:

• What is the impact of urban development on habitat loss? 

We will use innovative scientific methods to assess the impact of different post-2012 policy frameworks on habitat and biodiversity loss, providing the first quantitative assessment of their effectiveness in protecting nature. We hope to provide some early insights into the impacts of both Biodiversity Net Gain, and recent planning reforms.  

• Does the planning system prioritise ecology through its processes, or does it lose out to other economic and social goals?

We will use social science techniques to map the places in the planning process where ecological concerns are raised, and explore the weight that ecology holds against other economic and social priorities in the system.

• How well is the planning policy integrated with the need for landscape-level strategies for nature recovery?

Our landscape and urban studies teams will investigate the question of scale, exploring the different mapping processes for land allocation in planning and for the new Local Nature Recovery Strategies. We will ask whether landscape-scale mapping is being given sufficient weight within the area-based ecological approach that is currently dominant. 

• Whose view of nature is being prioritised?

We will use a mixture of social science and arts and humanities expertise to work with ecologists and communities. We are interested in the impacts of Biodiversity Net Gain on the types of ecological expertise that are valued in planning and their implications for alternative views and valuations of nature. We will explore whether there are democratic and social justice implications to current policy that have been overlooked. 

• Are there areas where planning policy and practice could be improved to ensure better ecological outcomes?

We want to provide robust recommendations to policymakers, professionals, and communities, to ensure that the planning system works optimally to prevent habitat and biodiversity loss. 

Our Principal Investigator, Professor Malcolm Tait says “Whilst the Government has just introduced a new system of Biodiversity Net Gain to mitigate the impacts of new development, we know little about how it will work in practice or how it integrates with other elements of our planning system. This project will be the first major study into how biodiversity is integrated into decisions about development, and will explore means by which planning for nature recovery might be better achieved.”