Our Partners

As a Russell Group University our research makes a difference across the world. We believe in breaking down the traditional barriers between academic disciplines so the bigger problems of the 21^st century can be considered from human as well as physical perspectives. We are constantly seeking new ways to engage with partners to build productive relationships that tackle some of the fundamental issues facing humankind.

The University is a joint founder of the Biodiversity and People Network, which builds upon numerous previous and ongoing collaborations with many of the network partners. The University is also taking the lead in managing the network.

The National Trust is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is the largest private landowner in the UK, with around 250,000 hectares of land, and Europe’s largest conservation charity, with 5.6 million members.

The National Trust is a founding member of the Biodiversity and People Network. Addressing the biodiversity crisis is key to its strategy and forms the basis of mutual ambitions with the University of Exeter and other network partners. The National Trust is in the process of carrying out its strategy to repurpose much of its land holdings for nature renewal, and to broaden access to green spaces, giving benefits beyond the ‘usual’ socio-economic and cultural groups.

Natural England is the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England and is a public body accountable to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Our statutory purpose is to “ensure that the natural environment is enhanced, conserved and managed for the benefit of present and future generations, thereby contributing to sustainable development”. Our vision is ‘Thriving Nature for people and planet’ and we aim to achieve this through our mission ‘Building partnerships for Nature’s recovery’.

We are very pleased to be founding partners within the University’s ‘Biodiversity and People’ Network, alongside the National Trust, and will work to grow this network over coming years. my colleagues and I are very enthusiastic about the potential of RENEW to make a significant contribution to our efforts to put people at the heart of biodiversity renewal and bring about a new paradigm in nature renewal.

NatureScot is the Scottish Government’s adviser for nature in Scotland. Inspired by nature, we work to enhance the state of nature for people and to address the Climate-nature Emergency.

We are hugely excited about the potential of RENEW to put people at the centre of addressing the climate-nature emergency and associated nature restoration. We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with the University of Exeter in both learning from and applying the findings of the outcomes of RENEW in our work. This includes development and delivery of the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy.

The NBN Trust is the UK charity that champions biodiversity data. Our mission is to bring together all those who generate, curate and use biodiversity data and to advocate for the use of biodiversity data to inform policy-making and decision-taking about the conservation, management, repair and recovery of nature.

The RENEW project aims to transform decision-making about biodiversity renewal, and we are excited to be a partner in this important endeavour. Enhancing the reach and impact of biodiversity data is our core purpose, and our involvement in the RENEW project – together with the participation of our wider NBN members – will help ensure that our collective efforts have the greatest possible benefit for the UK’s biodiversity.

The RSPB is a charity that takes actions for wild birds and the environment. We are one of the largest wildlife conservation charities in the country, with over 1 million members.

We are excited by the vision to transform society’s approach to biodiversity renewal, helping us to better understand how to take a truly holistic approach that integrates people into nature to deliver positive outcomes for biodiversity. I look forward to working with the team at the University of Exeter and at the National Trust.

The Wildlife Trusts is a grassroots movement of people from a wide range of backgrounds and all walks of life, who believe that we need nature and nature needs us. We own and manage 2,300 nature reserves across the UK (covering more than 100,000 ha) and have more than 850,000 members.

Nature’s recovery is our primary goal. For it to become a reality it will need us to understand how to bring about some very major shifts in the culture, attitudes and behaviours of many parts of UK society. We would very much like this to be the start of an ongoing strategic relationship between the University of Exeter, National Trust, ourselves and others.

The British Ecological Society is the world’s oldest ecological society with over 6,000 members around the globe.Our vision is that Nature and people thrive in a world inspired by ecology and as such aligns closely with the people-in nature approach.

The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) works to safeguard the environment, supports a world-leading food and farming UK industry, and sustain a thriving rural economy.

To ensure biodiversity renewal at landscape scale, Defra needs appropriate evidence with which to inform its policyactions. Specifically, staff are faced with the challenge of understanding the kind of approaches that work best on the ground for the delivery of biodiversity outcomes like those supported byagri-environmentschemes. Research is critical that helps identify in a rigorous way the different combinations of environmental and socioeconomic factors that lead to high quality engagement with biodiversity renewal among land managers.

JNCC is the public body that advises the UK Government and devolved administrations on UK-wide and international nature conservation.

We are very pleased that this strategic partnership makes a clear institutional commitment to the fundamentally important agenda of biodiversity renewal. The ‘Biodiversity and People’ network will provide a sustainable and long-term legacy to our relationship with the University and National Trust.

The Future Parks Accelerator is a collaboration between the National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Trust and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHCLG). Our ambition is to improve access to and experience of nature for millions of people living in the UK’s urban areas and establish a lasting legacy.

We are very much aware of the range of expertise in the sphere of people-nature connections held at the University of Exeter and can see huge potential for collaboration between our Future Parks programme and RENEW over the next five years.

The National Trust for Scotland mission includes protecting and enhancing nature and sharing our amazing places with everyone. We see the outputs and guidance emerging from the project as an extremely useful means of supporting our work and commitments to reversing the loss of biodiversity.

The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology is an independent, not-for-profit research institute, carrying out excellent environmental science across water, land and air. Our science makes a difference underpinning environmental policies, commercial innovation and conservation action all around the world.

BookTrust is the UK’s largest children’s reading charity. We work with a network of skilled delivery partners –including health visitors, schools, libraries, early years workers, authors, illustrators and publishers – to deliver books and evidence-based reading interventions that reach several million children and families each year. Our aim is getting every child reading –regularly and by choice.

The interplay between biodiversity and reading content and activities is one we are already committed to exploring. We are conscious of our responsibility to ensure our work can be delivered sustainably and we already select and curate books that explore many elements of biodiversity and the natural world, and support children in thinking about our environment and climate.

Our new strategy commits us to developing further thisapproach, and to playing our part in shared collaborative leadership to support bio-diversity renewal and respond to climate change within the education, early years, books and cultural sectors.

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries.

The Poetry Society is the UK’s national organisation for poetry and each year people participate in our activities in every postcode in the country. Creating Poetry activities which highlight environmental issues and connect people to nature especially through education are a lead commitment in our environmental action plan.

The Church Commissioners manage and own an extensive rural portfolio made up of various assets,including 92,000 acres of commercial farmland.

We hope that we can use the research carried out by the University of Exeter and National Trust to assist in developingour ESG strategyand wider thinkingas we develop a pathway to net zero emissions that protects and enhances natural capital enroute, aswell as allowing us to understand concerns of other landowners.

“I’m excited by this project’sassessment of biodiversity, helping us to better understand our impacts and dependenciesof our decision making and operationson biodiversity.”

The Church of England shares the University of Exeter’s and National Trust’s commitment to the fundamentally important agenda of biodiversity renewal, and we affirm the focus on people –their values, beliefs, practices, and agency.

The Eden Project has over 1 million visitors to its site each year and we are well advancedin negotiating new Eden Project sites and initiative across the globe.

The Eden Project are also excited to hear about the University of Exeter’s newly establishing Biodiversity and People Network. We feel that this network very much builds on much of our existing activities with Exeter andwe look forward to playing a key role in its development.

The Duchy owns 54,000 hectares, spread over 23 counties across England and Wales and includes a range of farming residential and commercial properties as well as an investment portfolio.

We very much see RENEW and the associated People in Nature Network helping to support an in-depth understanding of the drivers and speeding the need for change.

As one of the UK’s largest landowners, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has a major role to play in the conservation of the UK’s natural resources. The size, nature and past stewardship of the defence estate means that the MOD has responsibility for some of the most unspoilt and remote areas in Britain.

The MOD still faces the challenge of knowing how to manage our biodiversity assets most effectively and deciding where to focus efforts to best effect. We see the analysis and insights from the proposal as useful means of informing and supporting these activities, and look forward to working with the RENEW team to share experiences and emerging approaches and tools.

For over 100 years, Forestry England have been growing, shaping and caring for over 1,500 of our nation’s forests for the benefit and enjoyment of all, for this generation and the next.

The NFU is the largest agricultural trade association in England and Wales representing farmers and growers. RENEW will enable farmers to better engage with and make decisions on their farm that will increase biodiversity.

Severn Trent Water ave clear institutional commitment to the fundamentally important agenda of biodiversity renewal, including through their historic strategic partnership with the University of Exeter and National Trust. The Biodiversity and People Network will provide a sustainable and long-term legacy to our relationship with the University and National Trust.

Yorkshire Water is a water supply and treatment utility company. As a water company, biodiversity is fundamental to their core service of delivering a natural resource to customers, and protecting that resource from human impacts. Yorkshire Water works hard to find nature-based solutions to the challenges that they face, including investment in tree planting, peatland restoration and river enhancements.

The Biodiversity and People Network will engage staff from across the Yorkshire Water Land & Property and Conservation teams, including to co-design nature renewal actions across their land holdings.

By issuing Credits toward institutional use of AWS Services, the AWS Cloud Credits for Research Program supports researchers who seek to:

• Build cloud-hosted publicly available science-as-a-service applications, software, or tools to facilitate their future research and the research of their community.

• Perform proof of concept or benchmark tests evaluating the efficacy of moving research workloads or open data sets to the cloud.

• Train a broader community on the usage of cloud for research workloads via workshops or tutorials.

The CBI is a UK business organisation, which speaks on behalf of 190,000 businesses. Together they employ nearly 7 million people, about one-third of the private sector-employed workforce and including more than 180 trade associations. With offices in the UK and representation in Brussels, Washington, Beijing and Delhi, the CBI communicates the British business voice around the world.

The CBI understands that with ‘business delivering better for biodiversity’ we will increase our collective resilience to climate change and net-zero. Business cannot ‘deliver a step change’ without the right ‘biodiversity intelligence,’ reporting frameworks, business cultures and regulatory structures. There is a clear market deficit in terms of understanding, measuring, evaluating and addressing business impacts on biodiversity.

The CBI see RENEW as a critically important programme in helping address this market deficit and supporting ourselves and our members in better integrating biodiversity considerations in day-to-day business decision making.

Federated Hermes International (FHI) is a global institutional investor widely recognised as a global pioneer in sustainable investment. FHI’s goals are to seek out performance with positive outcomes.

We see RENEW and our wider partnership with the University of Exeter as establishing a partnership of global relevance and delivering applied thought-leadership with the power to practically re-orient the functional logic of capital markets worldwide, such that investment decisions more fully reflect the value of the biosphere upon which all life relies.

HSBC are one of the world’s largest financial institutions. They are already working with the National Trust as part of their Climate Solutions Partnership. This involves creating 2000 hectares of innovative wooded landscapes, which will help to protect and conserve nature for future generations and create diversified productive farming systems and places for people to experience and enjoy the natural world.

HSBC are particularly interested in helping to co-design and trial some of the novel methods that will be developed as part of the Biodiversity and People Network, such as the idea of creating biodiversity champions within organisations.

Lloyds Banking Group plc (LBG) is one of the UK’s largest financial services organisations, with 30 million customers and 65,000 employees. A sustainable and responsible approach to doing business is integral to everything we do. We also believe that biodiversity loss is one of the most urgent environmental and social issues of our time, and that the financial sector has a pivotal role to play in the renewal of biodiversity and natural habitat.

NatWest Group is the largest business and commercial bank in the UK, with a leading retail business.

We are hugely excited by this project’s vision to transform society’s approach to biodiversity renewal, helping us to better understand our impacts and dependencies of our decision making and operations on biodiversity.

Triodos Bank is an ethical bank based in the Netherlands, with branches in Belgium, Germany, France, United Kingdom and Spain. Their mission is to help to create a society that protects and promotes quality of life and human dignity for all. Triodos Bank finances companies which they believe add cultural value and benefit both people and the environment. This includes companies in the fields of solar energy, organic farming and culture.

The Biodiversity and People Network will help Triodos Bank to better understand the potential opportunities and trade-offs relating to their investments and decisions relating to biodiversity.

Allspring Global Investments is a global institutional asset manager. Allspring is working to embed ESG and sustainability concepts through products, services and culture. They believe that biodiversity loss is an urgent environmental and social issue, and that the financial sector has a pivotal role to play in the renewal of biodiversity.

Allspring’s partnership in the Biodiversity and People Network will help to achieve their aspiration as a leader in financial services investment solutions that can help to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is a global, CEO-led organisation of over 200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world. It helps to make their member companies more successful and sustainable by focusing on the maximum positive impact for shareholders, the environment and society.

The Biodiversity and People Network will help the WBCSD to tackle questions such as: How do we inspire and catalyse nature-positive’ leadership? How do we determine what it means to be a credible nature-positive business? And, how do we navigate and speed the journey, to becoming nature-positive’ across different magnitudes and sectors of business?