Decision-grade data on nature
Nature tech is emergent, but with it, improvements and impairments to nature can be measured with an integrity that can be trusted. Local communities of people, many of them resource-constrained, can steward nature together with inexpensive nature tech. With it, they have the capability to (digitally) measure, report and verify (dMRV) how they are preserving, […]
What a year…
This year in January, I became Co-Director of the Thriving Natural Capital Challenge Centre and Reader at SRUC, and blogged previously about that. 2022 has been an extremely busy and exciting time. I have now been Principle Investigator on 11 projects, successfully receiving almost £600k grants, including an award from Scottish government for Trustable Credit, […]
Co-directing for Thriving Natural Capital
In January 2022, I became the Co-director of The Thriving Natural Capital Challenge Centre at SRUC. Our goal is to research and build ecosystem markets to meet net-zero targets and reverse the biodiversity decline. We support thriving rural communities through regenerative agriculture and conservation. Natural capital can be defined as ‘renewable and non-renewable stocks of natural […]
COP26 videos & podcast
Scottish National Investment Bank Chair Willie Watt was interviewed by me at COP26 as part of the Finance for Nature conference. We discussed the public investment bank’s approach to nature – and climate-based investments as well as decision grade data. Willie Watt is the Chair of the Scottish National Investment Bank, a new publicly owned development bank […]
The first £billion is the hardest: Scotland’s challenge for natural capital
SRUC’s Thriving Natural Capital Challenge Centre is supporting the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers network in developing new natural capital investment projects that can deliver returns for investors, whether they are private businesses, public agencies or communities. As the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) continues this week, a new report by the Green Finance Institute has revealed […]
SRUCBytes & Science Festival event launched
When is a farm not a farm? I’m excited to Chair this Edinburgh International Science Festival event, this year online and free! Could a complex digital information system made of hardware and software be the answer to sustainable farming? Join Dominic Gammon of The Aquaponics Garden and Gordy Wills of Intelligent Growth Solutions to explore how […]
Trustable Credit launched
I’ve just launched Trustable Credit, if you’d like to join in co-creating, developing and testing open and international standards for digital devices and their data measuring carbon, biodiversity and nature improvements please check out the website. We are a distributed organisation, an adhocracy of interested parties, do join us! From the 2010 academic calls to […]
BLING & Parliamentary Showcase
There’s no shortage of acronyms in academia – its RIDDLED (not an acronym, just capitalised for emphasis) with them! I was thrilled to chair the BLING conference – the mid term of the EU Interreg North Sea Region project on Blockchain in Government, where we discussed use cases of blockchain and DLT adding value to […]
Best Research Paper 2020, ISC2021 & Agrimetrics
Impact in academia is deemed by the UKRI as a “demonstrable contribution that excellent social and economic research makes in shifting understanding and advancing scientific method, theory and application across and within disciplines.” Using participatory action research (PAR) is a method for achieving impact whilst research and development is ongoing, and my last journal paper […]
SRUC Senior Challenge Research Fellowship
Dr Hannah Rudman has just joined SRUC. She is Senior Challenge Research Fellow & Data Policy Lead. Hannah’s digital and data innovation applied research and development work is grounded in interdisciplinary Participatory Action Research, which is practice-led rather than practice-based, and typically helps to create actionable knowledge with participants. Its about working out how digital tools and data […]