Dr Sophus zu Ermgassen

Building the extraordinary amount of infrastructure required to decarbonize the global economy is both a necessity and one of the defining public policy and innovation challenges of our time. However, as an interdisciplinary ecological economist, I am acutely aware of the risk of ‘problem shift’: the historical tendency for innovations that solve one environmental constraint to transfer environmental burdens onto another frontier. This is my central concern with the scale of infrastructure needed for decarbonization. If pursued without careful planning, and with climate mitigation as the sole priority, the extraction and resources and development of this infrastructure has the potential to cause catastrophic losses of biodiversity. I am very happy to be part of Oxford EARTH to play my role in addressing these problems.

I am an ecological economist specialising in biodiversity finance, nature-positive organisations, biodiversity management for major infrastructure projects, and the biodiversity impacts of sand and construction minerals. I co-direct the biodiversity finance workstream at the University of Oxford’s Nature-positive hub. Ongoing projects include quantifying all of the species threatened globally by the extraction of sand and construction minerals, understanding different business models for biodiversity conservation, and establishing the scientific evidence base to ensure that emerging nature markets are ecologically effective. I have several government advisory roles on the themes of natural capital markets and nature credits in the UK and Europe. I’m co-host of the European Society for Ecological Economics podcast “Economics for Rebels”. I was named as one of the 100 most influential environmental professionals in the UK by newspaper the ENDS Report in 2022, won the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council’s early career policy impact award in 2023, and the Medical Physical and Life Sciences division’s early career impacts award in 2024.