The Nature Recovery Podcast

Send us Fan Mail What is the biggest misunderstanding people have about urban planning? How do we design cities for extreme climate events when nature is acting unpredictably? In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, hosts Dr. Wendee Zhang and Ada Grabowska-Zhang sit down with Professor Iain White f rom the University of Waikato. They explore the delicate politics of climate adaptation, the...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Vittorio Anah speaks with Camilla Burrow, the Chief Executive of the local environmental charity Wild Oxfordshire. Camilla explains the work Wild Oxfordshire has done and is planning do. Wild Oxfordshire are supporting The Nature Festival which happens in Oxford 21-27 June 2026. https://thenaturefestival.org/   They explore: Camilla’...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen Thomas is joined by Nat Duffus and Harrison Carter to unpack the often confusing world of biodiversity finance. Harrison introduces his new paper, Demystifying Biodiversity Finance , and explains why conservationists, ecologists and investors need a shared language to make sense of bonds, loans, equity, credits and risk. The...

Send us Fan Mail For a long time, freshwater experts thought of estuaries as just "the end of the river," while marine biologists dismissed them as "the bit where the sea comes in." But today, scientists realize that estuaries are incredibly complex, dynamic ecosystems in their own right.  In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen is joined by world-renowned estua...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen Thomas speaks with Lee White about a remarkable life working across science, conservation, and government in central Africa. Lee reflects on growing up in Uganda, studying rainforest ecosystems in West Africa and Gabon, and how his scientific work led him into national park creation, forest policy, and international climate n...

Send us Fan Mail Hosted by Wallerand Bazin, a DPhil researcher in Geography and the Environment at Oxford whose work focuses on the political ecologies of climate and conservation in heritage landscapes.  In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen Thomas and Wallerand Bazin speak with Guy Shrubsole about land ownership, stewardship, and the politics of nature recovery in Britain. Shru...

Send us Fan Mail Professor Ian Mell discusses how green infrastructure has moved from the margins of planning into mainstream conversation. He explains the political, economic and cultural barriers to delivery in the UK, cautions about uncritical reliance on markets and offsets, and highlights lessons from Asian cities where ambitious, large-scale projects and data-driven delivery have driven visi...

Send us Fan Mail Nature finance is often presented as a solution to biodiversity loss but what does it actually mean? In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, David Goodman speaks with Dr. Alice Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. Alice’s research maps and analyses public, private, and philanthropic finance flows into conservation across th...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we talk to Dr Keith Kirby MBE about Wytham Woods, a Thames Valley hill of limestone, ancient woodland and one of the most intensively studied woodland sites in the world. Keith traces the site’s deep history (a coral reef 150 million years ago), the human influence on the landscape over centuries, and the key decisions that shaped the wood we see today: enclosure a...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Elizabeth Bock speaks with Dr Molly Grace (University of Oxford), co-chair of the IUCN Green Status of Species working group. The conversation explains how the Green Status complements the Red List by measuring species recovery, not just extinction risk. Molly unpacks the three components of recovery (distribution, viability, functionality), explains how the assess...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen Thomas speaks with Professor Seirian Sumner , one of the world’s leading experts on social insects and a passionate advocate for rethinking our relationship with wasps. Seirian reveals how a reluctant PhD choice turned into a 25-year research career uncovering the remarkable societies, behaviours and ecological roles of these...

Send us Fan Mail Professor David Farrier (University of Edinburgh) discusses his 2025 book Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet and explores how rapid, human-driven evolutionary pressures reveal both the fragility and inventive resilience of life. We cover urban evolution (birds and snails), domestication and self-domestication, collective and distributed forms of intelligenc...

Send us Fan Mail Professor Cristina Banks-Leite (Imperial College London) discusses the realities of tropical forest restoration: from large-scale reforestation projects and the practical challenges of seedlings, land tenure and finance, to why measured “success” can look counter-intuitive. She explains why current biodiversity metrics often miss the point, and how novel tools (like acoustic monit...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Jason Williams , better known as The Cloud Gardener, shares how a lockdown balcony became a haven for biodiversity and wellbeing, leading him to the Chelsea Flower Show and a Churchill Fellowship exploring greener cities around the world. Later, researchers Martha Crockatt and Mattia Troiano talk to Raphaella Mascia and discuss their Oxford-based work on equity of...

Send us Fan Mail How should we think about killing, introductions and “invasives” in a world we’ve already changed? In this episode we talk to Hugh Warwick — ecologist, writer and hedgehog champion — about his award-winning book Cull of the Wild and the uncomfortable question at its heart: can killing ever be conservation? From hedgehogs on the Hebrides to rats on South Georgia, Hugh explores what...

Send us Fan Mail This episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast discusses legal personhood of nature , also known as rights of nature or more-than-human rights . Hosts Stephen Thomas, Hannah Wilson, and Diana Gusta sit down with lawyer and professor Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito , the founding director of the More-than-Human Life (MOTH) Collective . The discussion covers the following key points: The hist...

Send us Fan Mail Guests Natalie Duffus (DPhil student, Dept. of Biology) https://naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/people/natalie-duffus/ Matti Troiano (Research Assistant, School of Geography and the Environment) https://naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/people/mattia-troiano/ Host: Stephen Thomas (Centre Manager, Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery)  In this illuminating episode, we tackle the increasingly tangle...

Send us Fan Mail Nature Finance – Opportunities, Challenges, and What Comes Next In this episode, we delve into the fast-evolving world of nature finance — with a focus on schemes emerging in England, and insights relevant to the global shift toward blended finance for nature recovery. As governments increasingly look to private investment to complement public funding, what’s working, what’s not,...

Send us Fan Mail Discussing Ohio's beautiful forests and northern Ohio nature recovery efforts with Jessica Miller Mecaskey, Consulting Forester at Holden Forests and Gardens, one of the U.S.'s largest and foremost arboretums.  Bio: Jessica Miller Mecaskey was born and raised in Northeast Ohio and is a forestry and natural resource professional with specialization in woodland ecosystems,...

Send us Fan Mail This podcast covers topics including current environmental threats to Ohio's habitats and species, nature recovery work being undertaken in urban and rural areas, as well as ways people can become involved in Ohio nature recovery. In Part 1 of our Ohio Nature Recovery series, we will be talking with Anna Zaremba, the Nature-based Solutions Sustainability Manager for the City...

Send us Fan Mail This week I'm joined by Andrew Allen, the lead policy advocate on land use for the woodland trust. We will be discussing their new report out on the 3rd of December and how it attempts to encourage more debate as to how we go about recovering nature. You can find a link to the report here: https://www.naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/projects/exploring-the-role-of-the-state-in-achievi...

Send us Fan Mail This month sees the publication of The Nattergal Report on Stakeholder Engagement Best Practice for Landscape-scale Nature Recovery Projects . Developed for the Boothby Wildland Landscape Recovery project, and funded via the DEFRA Landscape Recovery Development Phase, the report was led by the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire...

Send us Fan Mail Who pays is a challenging question in any nature recovery project. In this episode we chat with Christoph Warrack of Woodland Savers ( https://woodlandsavers.org/ ) about how they use a mix of finance sources to enable community ownership of natural areas. Reports referenced: The Lawton Review - Making Space for Nature (2010), and The State of Natural Capital report (2024). The Le...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest this week is Professor Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland who is the Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at Oxford. She leads the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science , founded the Conservation Optimism organization and co-founded the Saiga Conservation Alliance . In June 2024 she published a perspectives piece entitled  Now is the time for conservationists to st...

Send us Fan Mail Human societies and their use of land have transformed ecology across this planet for thousands of years. As a result, the global patterns of life on Earth, the biomes, can no longer be understood without considering how humans have altered them. Anthromes, or anthropogenic biomes, characterise the globally significant ecological patterns created by sustained direct human interact...