Academic
2026 Conference Keynotes
In February, Hannah was the closing keynote presenter at the Resilient Land and Seas 2026 Symposium. Collaborating at scale for nature and people was the theme of the conference held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. Hannah took a look back at the journey of the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital, and reflected on how…
Honorary Fellowship
Hannah has been awarded Honorary Fellowship of University of Edinburgh in the School of Geosciences’ Centre for Sustainable Forests and Landscapes. She is leading the UK Nations and International Co-operation theme in the Integrating Finance and Biodiversity programme with UK CEH funded by UKRI’s NERC, and supporting the EU funded CircHive project.
Financing an Environment for Wales
The purpose of Financing an Environment for Wales is to set a collective approach to financing the environment that the country needs. Share insight on actions already being taken, such as the cultivation of nature markets. The theme Hannah leads on the Integrating Finance and Biodiversity programme is a funding partner in the conference, together…
Trustable AI in Mapping
Hannah’s Trustable AI in Mapping (TAiM) project was funded by over £1m from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. The project has developed new standards to assess the reliability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms used in environmental mapping. The consortium of geospatial and environmental data experts issued a joint press release: “From Black Box to Benchmark,…
Scotland’s Rainforest restoration discussed at 2 English Conferences
Dr Hannah Rudman presented the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest’s (ASR) work at the British Ecological Society’s annual conference in Liverpool during December, and in Cardiff during November at the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management Autumn conference. Together with ecologist Julia McCarthy at CIEEM, Hannah presented how the ASR creates successful projects that align…
Taking Scotland’s Rainforest to Davos’ World Biodiversity Forum
As biodiversity hotspots, Scotland’s rainforests are internationally important. The sheer quantity, diversity and rarity of the lichens, mosses and liverworts they are home to is stunning and a joy to experience for experts and non-experts alike. But, like much of the world’s most precious ecosystems, they need our help. Scotland’s rainforest lies in a zone…
Funding boost to address decline of biodiversity
Hannah’s work at the James Hutton Institute, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, is part of an innovative programme that has won £3 million funding to enable UK companies to integrate nature into financial decision-making and to mobilise investment in biodiversity. The Integrating Finance and Biodiversity (IFB) Programme has already established a network of 250 organisations,…
Investing in data for nature-based projects – a case study from Lauriston Farm
My latest video explains why it is useful to invest in data collection to establish baselines, and prove changes through time. The Lauriston Farm team and their investor Federated Hermes Limited discuss how they are collecting data to prove the social, economic and environmental impacts of their regenerative agriculture and community engagement practices. There is a written case…
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
Hannah 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 that a minimum of £44…
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…
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…
DLT Course for Everyone
When I worked with SRUC, I developed a course that anyone can take as a learning journey, on Distributed Ledger Technology in the Natural Economy Sector.
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…
This is Huge… This is BIG
When you write an article for a peer-reviewed academic article, the feedback and evidence of impact you expect is a citation in another journal article in the future. So I was pleasantly surprised to get positive social media feedback on LinkedIn immediately for Piece of Cake: Assuring Specific Qualities of Product in Farm Lifecycles with…
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…
Paper published in Educational Action Research
As Honorary Fellow at Durham University, our multidisciplinary academic team is running a research and development project with a Science Centre in Newcastle, the International Centre for Life. We are investigating whether engagement with science improves when innovation and creativity is at the heart of science education. In order to test this, Durham University’s researchers have worked…