The Green Feast Seminar

We are delighted to announce this year's Green Feast Seminar speaker is Andrea Ledward, CBE, (PPP, 1992), St Hilda's alumna and International Biodiversity and Climate Director at DEFRA. Following Andrea, we welcome Clarendon-funded DPhil student in the Department of Biology, Jonathan Rutter.

View 1 'A transition to a nature positive future’. Andrea Ledward, CBE, (PPP, 1992)

The Dasgupta review on the Economics of Biodiversity highlighted that our demands on nature far and increasingly exceed its capacity to supply us with the goods and services we rely on. The rate and impacts of biodiversity loss are increasing. Global international nature and climate shocks can directly affect UK sectors and society through disruption to UK global supply chains and international trade. If severe nature and climate-related risks materialise in the coming decade, UK GDP could fall by up to 12%. By 2050, land degradation and climate change together are predicted to reduce crop yields by an average of 10% globally and by up to 50% in certain regions jeopardising global and domestic food security. More than 30% of emerging disease events are caused by land-use change, agricultural expansion and urbanisation. Combined with increasing trends in the consumption and trade in wildlife, this increases the risk of future global pandemics. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation worldwide exacerbate risks from extreme weather and longer-term climate change, leading to impacts on human migration and on resource competition that create drivers of conflict and insecurity. In 2022, the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed 23 global targets to halt and reverse global biodiversity loss 2030. At the midpoint in the decade we need to accelerate action and understanding.

View 2 'Seabirds, fisheries, and why we should care about things we can’t see' Jonathan Rutter

Fisheries are critical for global food security but have far-reaching impacts on marine biodiversity. For example, hundreds of thousands of seabirds are unintentionally killed every year by fishing vessels, a phenomenon known as bycatch. If bycatch continues at current levels worldwide, dozens of seabird species could be at risk of extinction within our lifetimes. In this presentation, I will share how I am repurposing existing technologies to uncover high-risk interactions between seabirds and fishing vessels, even when those vessels are hidden from public view. This research will shed light on who should bear responsibility for the conservation of seabirds, and how that responsibility might fall closer to home than we realise