All Biodiversity-Positive Design projects are valuable, but which ones help bend the biodiversity extinction curve?

Humans and nature have an entangled past, present and future, which has become obscured in an era of biodiversity loss and increasingly urbanised human populations. The recent focus on biodiversity-positive design, as one of many related approaches to re-engage with these entanglements, signals a re-emerging global recognition of the fundamental connections between humans and nature.

Within the growing body of guidance documents for Biodiversity-Positive Design, there is a common recognition that biodiversity is a multi-dimensional concept and can mean many different things to many different people.  Indeed, the profusion of language and frameworks related to biodiversity offer enormous flexibility in how a goal or vision for biodiversity can be framed within a project, and ultimately influence the realised biodiversity gain at the end of the project. The importance of considering the site-specific voices and opportunities places novel ecosystems and pollination services on equal footing with efforts to expand populations of rare plants or create habitat for under-represented fauna.

This presentation does not seek to challenge this flexibility in expressing the situated biodiversity associated with place.   Instead, it takes a closer look at those projects that explicitly seek to bend the biodiversity extinction curve and counter the potential for the biotic homogenisation of cities.  By drawing upon three frameworks (Nature Futures, Kowarik's 4 Natures and the frames of "wild", "stray" and "care") and global datasets of biodiversity in cities, the presentation will seek to provide a more nuanced understanding of how the socio-cultural and eco-evolutionary histories of cities reposition the relative contributions that different frames of nature offer for suppporting the unique biodiversity in cities in multiple continents.  This knowledge is critical for bringing a more nuanced approach to Biodiversity-Positive Design, where the objective is to support the dimensions of biodiversity related to vulnerability, endemism and foregrounding outcomes that are unique to a place.