Sustainability

Consequences of Biodiversity Loss

What are the consequences of biodiversity loss and change for people’s wellbeing? Working across the full chain of interacting effects of environmental change from biological processes and functions, to impacts on people, how can we better monitor, predict and mitigate the more deleterious consequences of biodiversity loss and change?

We aim to develop useful approaches and tools that can be applied in different environments in the UK and overseas.

Environmental Change and Biodiversity

What are the consequences of biodiversity loss and change for people’s wellbeing? Working across the full chain of interacting effects of environmental change from biological processes and functions, to impacts on people, how can we better monitor, predict and mitigate the more deleterious consequences of biodiversity loss and change?

We aim to develop useful approaches and tools that can be applied in different environments in the UK and overseas.

Limits to Adaptive Change

What limits the rate of biological adjustment and/or adaptation to a changing environment? Adaptation can be achieved by behavioural responses, phenotypic plasticity, dispersal or evolution. But each of these mechanisms has different costs and benefits for species and population persistence.

How can we evaluate the limits in different kinds of species and across habitats? What is the evidence from empirical studies and from historical events? We address these questions using studies in the field, laboratory and from theory.

Impacting policy

CBER researchers work closely with governments, NGOs and stakeholders to influence policy, and to promote a transition to a survivable future, where social and ecological justice depends on organising human economies as a part of nature, rather than in opposition to it. 

Communicating science

CBER is committed to promoting science as a creative and inclusive way of seeing the world, celebrating our understanding of nature, as well as embracing our uncertainty about how it works. Science is also fundamental to rational, evidence-based policy.

UCL Biosciences Undergraduate Students win Hult Prize

Four UCL undergraduates have won the international Hult Prize after conceiving a rice drying business which will reduce the millions of tons of rice wasted annually - helping to solve one of the world's most pressing problems.