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Curated experts in sustainability fields who can thoroughly elaborate their view based on their accumulated knowledge and experience

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Christopher Marquis

Professor
University of Cambridge

About

Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the author of the award-winning books Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.

Chris has written over 20 peer-reviewed academic articles and published over 50 Harvard Business cases. He received a PhD in Sociology and Business Administration from the University of Michigan and served as Vice President and Technology Manager at JP Morgan Chase before returning to academia.
Passionate about how academic research can help people around the world address our most significant challenges, he examines how some of the biggest crises of our day —climate change, inequality, and racism — are intimately connected with how our current form of capitalism has prioritized accumulating and concentrating wealth for the few affects the concerns and needs of everyone and everything else. His research and writing focus on the need to rebalance the interactions between corporations, governments, and civil society to deliver socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes to all. 

April 13, 2026

Farms, Finance, Futures: This Week's Regeneration Research Digest

Farms, Finance, Futures: This Week's Regeneration Research Digest

What the latest research reveals about regenerative practices

This week we begin with new infrastructure for circular agriculture, mapping how farm-level practices actually operate in practice. From there, the focus broadens to biodiversity finance, where institutional reform, not capital scarcity, emerges as the binding constraint. Climate risk is then reframed through a more complex lens, showing how extreme outcomes can arise even under moderate warming scenarios. Finally, the lens turns inward to how integrating Indigenous knowledge systems can reshape both research and practice toward more relational, long-term approaches.

Read on below for highlights and links across these themes: 

  • Mapping Farm Circularity: Building the data infrastructure to understand how circular practices actually function at the farm level
  • Financing Nature at Scale: Why biodiversity loss is fundamentally a governance failure, not a capital shortage
  • Adaptation Under Uncertainty: How moderate warming scenarios can still produce extreme, system-wide climate risks
  • Braiding Knowledge Systems: Integrating Indigenous and Western approaches to redefine sustainability as a relational practice

Mapping Farm Circularity 

This article introduces a novel, large-scale dataset that positions circular economy (CE) practices in agriculture as an empirical and organizational field of inquiry rather than a purely normative agenda. Drawing on a structured survey of 1,200 Italian farms, the authors assemble a granular dataset that captures how farms operationalize circularity through waste reduction, biomass valorization, regenerative inputs, and resource efficiency.

The contribution lies less in advancing theory directly than in building the empirical infrastructure needed to study how circular practices diffuse, vary, and perform at the farm level. In doing so, the article reframes food waste not merely as a byproduct of inefficiency but as a key leverage point within broader agro-ecological systems, where reducing surplus and improving input-output ratios can simultaneously address environmental degradation and production pressures.

By making visible the heterogeneity of farm behaviors and practices, the dataset opens up new analytical possibilities: comparing adoption patterns, identifying barriers to circular transitions, and linking micro-level practices to system-wide sustainability outcomes. The article ultimately positions data itself as a critical bottleneck in advancing circular agriculture, arguing that without detailed, standardized, and accessible farm-level evidence, both policy design and organizational change remain constrained.

Read more: Survey data on Circular Economy practices in Italian farms with a focus on surplus food and food waste (Nature, Scientific Data, 2026)

Financing Nature at Scale 

This article reframes biodiversity loss not simply as an environmental crisis but as a systemic failure of economic and institutional design. The authors argue that the core challenge is not a lack of global capital, but the absence of governance structures capable of directing finance toward long-term ecological resilience. Despite biodiversity underpinning over half of global GDP and generating substantial co-benefits, it remains chronically undervalued due to market exclusions, inappropriate discounting practices, and misaligned incentives.

The authors identify a persistent biodiversity finance gap driven by political economy constraints: entrenched subsidies that incentivize ecological harm, investor norms prioritizing short-term returns, weak institutional capacity in developing regions, and an overreliance on voluntary mechanisms that lack durability. These dynamics produce uneven funding distributions and reinforce structural underinvestment, even where ecological urgency is highest.

Rather than proposing purely technical fixes, the article emphasizes institutional reform as the central lever for scaling conservation. It outlines a portfolio of politically informed solutions: phased mandatory corporate contributions, blended finance models that de-risk private investment, subsidy reform aligned with social compensation, and integration of biodiversity into national accounting and financial regulation. Across these approaches, credibility, transparency, and implementation capacity emerge as decisive conditions for success.

Read more: Scaling biodiversity conservation through institutional reform (Conservation Biology, 2026)

Adaptation Under Uncertainty 

This article challenges conventional climate risk framing by arguing that moderate global warming scenarios do not preclude extreme, system-wide climate outcomes. Rather than treating worst-case futures as tied exclusively to high-end warming levels (e.g., 3–4°C), the authors show that extreme global climate configurations can emerge even under intermediate warming pathways due to spatially compounding and interacting climate hazards.

Drawing on climate model ensembles, the study introduces a more nuanced approach to identifying “worst-case” climates, focusing on coherent global patterns of extremes rather than simple averages. This reframing reveals that regional extremes (e.g., simultaneous heatwaves, droughts, and precipitation shocks) can align in ways that amplify systemic risks to food systems, infrastructure, and ecosystems, even when global mean temperature increases appear moderate.

The article intervenes in how climate risk is communicated and governed. By highlighting the limitations of average-based projections, it underscores the need for risk assessment frameworks that account for tail risks, compound events, and spatial interdependencies. In doing so, it pushes adaptation planning toward more robust, precautionary strategies that remain resilient under a wider spectrum of plausible futures.

Read more: Moderate global warming does not rule out extreme global climate outcomes (Nature, 2026)

Braiding Knowledge Systems 

This article positions sustainability science as an incomplete project without the meaningful integration of Indigenous knowledge systems. Drawing on a collaborative workshop with Indigenous knowledge holders and researchers in Ontario, the authors argue that dominant Western approaches—rooted in reductionism and growth-oriented logic—are structurally ill-equipped to address interconnected ecological crises. Instead, they propose a paradigm shift toward relational, holistic, and regenerative frameworks grounded in Indigenous worldviews.

Central to the article is the concept of “braiding” knowledge systems, particularly through approaches like Two-Eyed Seeing, which treats Indigenous and Western epistemologies as complementary rather than hierarchical. The authors map key overlaps, such as systems thinking and circularity, while emphasizing Indigenous distinctions, including relational accountability, reciprocity, and seven-generational thinking. These perspectives reframe sustainability from technical optimization to a fundamentally ethical and relational practice, where human–nature interactions are guided by respect, responsibility, and long-term stewardship.

The article also critiques the institutional norms of science itself, challenging the assumed neutrality and detachment of Western research. It introduces concepts such as “research as ceremony,” intentionality in scientific practice, and place-based, community-engaged methodologies. These approaches foreground purpose, positionality, and accountability, countering extractive research traditions and aligning inquiry with regeneration rather than exploitation.

Ultimately, it calls for actionable transformation: embedding Indigenous knowledge into research design, fostering long-term community relationships, and redefining scientific success beyond publication and innovation metrics. Sustainability, in this framing, becomes not just a technical field but a cultural and epistemic reorientation toward restoring balance between humans, knowledge systems, and the living world.

Read more: Braiding Knowledge Systems: Integrating Indigenous Wisdom and Sustainable Research for a Regenerative Future (ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 2026)

 

 

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March 17, 2026

Transparency, Regulation, Impacts: This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines

Transparency, Regulation, Impacts: This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines

What Caught My Eye: Readings and reflections on regenerative finance, farming, and the forces reshaping sustainability.

This week’s selections cover a range of issues shaping how sustainability is communicated, governed, and implemented, from transparency in everyday consumer products to the evolution of climate and biodiversity policy in Europe. The stories span topics including textile labeling, biodiversity research, Alpine tourism under climate pressure, and new evidence on the scale of extreme heat across the continent. They also examine shifts in EU regulation and enforcement, alongside emerging research on which climate policies have proven most effective at reducing emissions.

Read below for highlights and links on the following topics.

  • Textile Transparency: Marketing terms like “silky” or “bamboo” can obscure the true materials and environmental impacts of textiles.

  • EU Rules Rollback: EU sustainability rules were scaled back, exempting about 90% of companies from reporting requirements.

  • Human-Shaped Biodiversity: Biodiversity declined after the Black Death as farming collapsed and landscapes became more uniform.

  • Climate-Strained Skiing: Warming winters and tourism pressures are reshaping Alpine ski towns and their economies.

  • Extreme Heat Surge: Extreme heat in Europe has increased roughly tenfold since the late 20th century.

  • Biodiversity Enforcement: The EU court fined Portugal €10 million for failing to protect designated conservation sites.

  • EU 2040 Target: The EU adopted a binding target to cut net emissions 90% by 2040.

  • Effective Climate Policies: A global study identifies carbon pricing and renewable investment as the most reliable emissions-cutting policies.

Textile Transparency

Misleading textile marketing terms such as “silky,” “bamboo,” or “antimicrobial” often obscure the real materials and processes behind clothing and household fabrics, making it difficult for consumers to judge environmental impact. Researchers explain that “silkiness” usually results from fabric construction (like satin weaves) rather than fibre type, meaning very different materials can feel similar while carrying vastly different ecological consequences. Stronger disclosure rules, such as the EU’s planned digital product passports, could improve transparency about fibres, chemicals, and production methods.

Read more: ‘Silky’ doesn’t mean it’s made from silk – how confusing textile language can harm the environment (The Conversation)

EU Rules Rollback

 A major rollback of the European Union’s corporate sustainability regulations, covering climate disclosure and supply-chain accountability, has exempted about 90% of companies and delayed key reporting requirements, largely due to competitiveness arguments and coordinated lobbying. The debate unfolded largely within Brussels policy circles, with limited media coverage or public mobilisation, while NGOs, investors, and supportive businesses failed to mount effective resistance. The episode exposes structural weaknesses in the political defence of sustainability regulation and highlights the need for clearer public narratives, stronger coalitions, and policies backed by real economic incentives.

Read more: How Europe’s Climate and Sustainability Rules Were Shredded While Citizens Remained in the Dark (DeSmog)

Human-Shaped Biodiversity

Research using fossil pollen records shows that after the Black Death drastically reduced Europe’s population in the 14th century, plant biodiversity also declined rather than increased. The collapse of farming led to land abandonment and more uniform landscapes, replacing the patchwork of fields, hedgerows, and woodland that had supported diverse plant ecosystems for centuries. The findings suggest that traditional, low-intensity agriculture historically enhanced biodiversity and that removing human land management, such as through rewilding, may not always increase ecological diversity.

Read more: The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity (The Conversation)

Climate-Strained Skiing

Alpine resort towns such as Chamonix face mounting pressure as climate change shortens snow seasons while tourism and short-term rentals from platforms like Airbnb intensify development and housing shortages. Snow cover in parts of the Mont Blanc region now lasts about a month less than it did in 1970, pushing resorts to upscale and attract wealthier international visitors even as the long-term viability of skiing becomes uncertain. The combination of warming winters, luxury real estate expansion, and seasonal tourism is reshaping Alpine communities and threatening their sustainability.

Read more: A Crisis in the Alps: Airbnb, Climate Change and Americans (The New York Times)

Extreme Heat Surge

A new climate model developed by researchers at University of Graz can measure how human-driven emissions intensify extreme weather by tracking changes in frequency, duration, and intensity of events like heatwaves and droughts. Using the method, scientists found extreme heat across Europe increased roughly tenfold between 1961–1990 and 2010–2024, clearly linking rising hazards to human-caused climate change. The worsening extremes are already producing major human and economic costs, including tens of thousands of heat-related deaths and tens of billions of euros in climate damages.

Read more: ‘Groundbreaking’ model can calculate true impact of climate change and it’s bad news for Europe (Euronews)

Biodiversity Enforcement

The Court of Justice of the European Union fined Portugal €10 million for failing to protect dozens of biodiversity sites required under the EU Habitats Directive, with an additional daily penalty of €41,250 until compliance is achieved. The ruling found that 55 designated conservation areas, which are home to rare habitats and species, had still not received the required legal protection years after a 2019 court order. The decision underscores the EU’s effort to enforce biodiversity conservation rules when member states fail to implement them.

Read more: Portugal fined £8.7m by EU court for failing to protect biodiversity (The Guardian)

EU 2040 Target

The Council of the European Union has formally adopted an amendment to the European Climate Law establishing a binding 2040 target to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 90% compared with 1990 levels. The measure strengthens the EU’s pathway to climate neutrality by 2050 while allowing limited use of high-quality international carbon credits, up to 5% of 1990 emissions, to help meet the target. The law also introduces flexibility across sectors, promotes carbon removals, and adjusts the timeline for the EU’s expanded emissions trading system for buildings and transport.

Read more: 2040 climate target: Council gives final green light (Council of the European Union)

Effective Climate Policies

A large comparative study of 1,737 climate policies across 40 countries identifies 28 measures that consistently reduce emissions, including carbon taxes, emissions trading systems, energy efficiency standards, renewable energy research funding, and fossil-fuel subsidy removal. Using a new statistical filtering method based on Bayesian modelling, researchers isolate policies that show reliable results across different contexts rather than evaluating them in isolation. The findings highlight carbon pricing, taxation, and renewable energy investment as the most consistently effective tools for cutting emissions.
 
Read more: Which climate policies actually make a difference? Our new analysis has the answer (The Conversation)

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February 23, 2026

Capital, Resilience, Tipping: This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines

Capital, Resilience, Tipping: This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines

What Caught My Eye: Readings and reflections on regenerative finance, farming, and the forces reshaping sustainability.

This week’s selection focuses on structural responses to escalating climate and biodiversity risk. Across supply chains, finance, oceans and food systems, the emphasis is on how governance, capital allocation and operational design shape resilience—or deepen exposure.

We begin with intelligent logistics and data integration, move into biodiversity finance and justice-based approaches, and then examine coastal regeneration, climate-induced hunger risk and accelerating warming signals. The final pieces consider overshoot tipping points and widening geopolitical divergence in climate policy.

Below are concise highlights and links:

  • Intelligent Logistics: FedEx argues integrated, AI-driven data systems are key to efficiency, disruption management and sustainability compliance.

  • Beyond Pricing Nature: Scientists shift from “ecosystem services” valuation to justice-based strategies targeting structural drivers of biodiversity loss.

  • Ending Business as Usual: Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services finds $7.3tn in nature-negative finance dwarfing conservation spending, calling for systemic reform.

  • Coastal Regeneration: Stockholm Environment Institute highlights mangroves and seagrasses as underused mitigation and adaptation tools aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

  • Climate Hunger Futures: European Commission Joint Research Centre modelling shows emissions pathways determine future mass food insecurity.

  • Accelerating Warming: NASA data indicate rising warming rates and possible feedback amplification.

  • Overshoot Risks: Breaching 1.5°C raises irreversible Earth-system risks; offsets cannot substitute for rapid emissions cuts and ecosystem restoration.

  • Climate Policy Divergence: Regulatory retreat in the US contrasts with continued renewable buildout in China.

Intelligent Logistics

FedEx’s Future of Logistics Intelligence Report argues that closing the gap between visibility and action is critical to building resilient, low-impact supply chains. Surveying 700 global professionals, the company finds that fragmented data systems undermine predictive capacity, while AI-driven, integrated logistics intelligence can enhance efficiency, reduce disruptions and support sustainability compliance amid geopolitical and trade uncertainty.

Read more: FedEx: Why Efficiency is the Future of Sustainable Logistics (BizClik)

Beyond Pricing Nature 

Decades of framing biodiversity as “ecosystem services” with trillion-dollar valuations failed to halt accelerating species loss, as market-based appeals proved unable to overcome entrenched power dynamics and political economy constraints. Biologists are now pivoting toward “biodiversity justice” approaches—building alliances with Indigenous groups, social movements and critical scholars—to confront structural drivers of environmental destruction rather than relying on boardroom-friendly economic rationales.

Read more: Putting a price tag on nature failed. Can radical tactics save it? (New Scientist)

Ending Business as Usual

An Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessment warns that prevailing growth-driven business models are structurally linked to biodiversity loss, with $7.3 trillion in nature-negative finance flows in 2023 dwarfing the $220 billion directed toward conservation. The report argues that regulatory gaps, weak incentives and misaligned profit structures make degradation more lucrative than protection, urging over 100 systemic actions to realign finance, policy and corporate strategy toward regenerative and economically resilient outcomes.

Read more: ‘Business as usual’ is driving biodiversity decline, says report (Sustainability Online)

Coastal Regeneration Push 

Ahead of COP 31 and CBD COP 17, researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute argue that ocean-based solutions—capable of delivering up to 35% of needed emissions cuts by 2050—remain underused despite growing inclusion in national climate plans. Protecting and restoring mangroves, coral reefs and seagrasses, aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30% target, is framed as essential to climate adaptation, biodiversity recovery and the development of resilient blue economy business models rooted in community participation.

Read more: Coastal innovation is critical for climate and biodiversity (Stockholm Environment Institute)

Climate Hunger Futures

An AI modelling study by the European Commission Joint Research Centre warns that under high-emissions pathways, climate change alone could expose more than 1.1 billion people—over 600 million of them children—to at least one severe food crisis by 2100, with Africa facing the heaviest burden. However, rapid decarbonisation and sustainable development could spare up to 780 million people and halve annual exposure to hunger by century’s end, underscoring how policy choices determine whether climate risk translates into mass food insecurity.

Read more: Climate change could expose 1.1 billion people to hunger by 2100 (but there’s good news too) – AI modelling study (The Conversation)

Accelerating Warming Signal 

A Washington Post analysis of NASA data finds that the past 30 years mark the fastest warming period since 1880, with the rate rising from about 0.19°C per decade after 1970 to roughly 0.27°C per decade today. Scientists point to reduced cooling from sulfate aerosols and possible cloud feedback changes as drivers of the recent surge, raising concern that climate impacts may intensify faster than previously projected.

Read more: Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened (The Washington Post)

Overshoot Tipping Points 

Breaching 1.5°C is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible Earth-system tipping points—from destabilized ice sheets and permafrost methane release to Amazon dieback—while weakening natural carbon sinks makes a “return” from overshoot harder. The piece argues that credible pathways now hinge on rapid emissions cuts paired with scalable, verifiable carbon drawdown and ecosystem restoration, warning that offsets and speculative negative-emissions plans won’t substitute for real regenerative action.

Read more: Overshoot: The World Is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate (Yale Environment 360)

Climate Policy Divergence

The Guardian argues that the Trump administration’s move to scrap the Obama-era endangerment finding—central to US federal climate regulation—marks a profound rollback that strengthens fossil fuel interests amid escalating billion-dollar climate disasters. In contrast, China has recorded nearly two years of flat or declining emissions and continues large-scale investment in renewables, highlighting a widening geopolitical divide in the global clean energy transition despite ongoing concerns over coal expansion and supply chain ethics.

Read more: The Guardian view on Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead (The Guardian)

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January 5, 2026

Ecology, Justice, Governance: This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines

Ecology, Justice, Governance: This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines

What Caught My Eye: Readings and reflections on regenerative finance, farming, and the forces reshaping sustainability.

Across finance, law, science, and technology, a shared tension emerges: the tools to address ecological breakdown exist, but their deployment is constrained by inequality, short-term politics, and contested notions of responsibility. Regeneration, in this context, is less about innovation and more about reordering who bears risk, who holds decision-making authority, and whose futures are prioritized.

The selection of news items this week confronts the rising economic toll of climate disasters, Africa’s deeply unequal climate burden, speculative solar geoengineering, and subtle ecological shifts that reveal how living systems are already reorganising themselves in response to accumulated warming. Also covered are sovereign debt and biodiversity in the Amazon, human rights–based climate thresholds, and the sidelining of climate science.

Scroll down for mood on these highlights and links to the underlying stories:

  • Regenerative Debt Finance – Debt-for-nature swaps as a tool for ecosystem protection, and whether debt leverage could support regeneration without financialising nature.
  • Rights-Based Transition – Framing climate change as a human-rights crisis, with legal accountability and “carbon space” as prerequisites for regenerative outcomes.
  • Science-Led Transition – Why regeneration depends on listening to climate science, long-term restoration, and protection against short-term political reversals.
  • Climate Justice Divide – How climate change amplifies inequality, and why regenerative practice must redistribute power, finance, and opportunity.
  • Disaster Cost Reckoning – $120 billion in climate disaster losses in 2025, underscoring the economic case for prevention, adaptation, and ecosystem restoration.
  • Unequal Climate Burden – Africa’s escalating climate impacts despite minimal emissions, and the limits of adaptation under debt and financing constraints.
  • Solar Tech Gamble – The risks of profit-driven solar geoengineering and the danger of technological fixes crowding out systemic decarbonization.
  • Ecological Rewiring – What shifting moss spore cycles reveal about long-term ecological adjustment to climate change.

Regenerative Debt Finance

Debt-for-nature swaps can be a regenerative finance tool that converts sovereign debt relief into long-term ecosystem protection, illustrated by Ecuador’s Amazon deal that trades cheaper refinancing for expanded conservation. The article explores whether China, as the world’s largest bilateral creditor through the Belt and Road Initiative, could redirect its debt leverage toward regeneration, while highlighting deep tensions around transparency, extractivism, and the risk of financializing nature rather than transforming development pathways.

Read more: “Countries Want Debt Relief for Conservation. Is China Ready to Play a Role?” (Inside Climate News)

Rights-Based Transition

Climate change is a human-rights crisis that demands a “just boundary” for warming and far deeper emissions cuts by wealthy societies to create “carbon space” for poorer communities to meet basic needs without compounding harm. Regenerative practice needs to manage natural resources in ways that restore climate stability as a collective public good, backed by stronger legal accountability (linking climate obligations with human rights) and attribution science to connect emissions to specific harms and displacement.

Read more: “How climate change is threatening human rights” (Global Issues)

Science-Led Transition

Ignoring climate science is a political failure that accelerates ecological collapse, while listening to scientists opens pathways for regeneration, from renewable energy expansion to habitat protection and species recovery. Regenerative practice can only be achieved through long-term restoration—securing habitats, rebuilding ecosystems, upgrading infrastructure like grids, and protecting the high seas—paired with accountability to prevent rapid, irreversible environmental destruction driven by short-term political decisions.

Read more: Our leaders must listen to scientists on climate change – or catastrophe is around the corner (Big Issue)

Climate Justice Divide

Climate change is an inequality multiplier that deepens global economic divides, with the poorest, especially in the Global South, women, and informal workers, bearing the brunt of climate shocks despite contributing least to emissions. Regenerative practices through climate justice solutions can redistribute power and resources: expanded climate finance, taxing carbon-intensive wealth to fund adaptation, inclusive green jobs, and community-led resilience that links ecological repair with economic equity.

Read more: Why Climate Change Is Deepening Global Economic Inequality (BW Businessworld)

Disaster Cost Reckoning

Climate disasters in 2025 caused at least $120 billion in economic losses, with heatwaves, wildfires, cyclones, floods, and droughts intensifying across four continents as global warming accelerates. We need to move beyond insured losses toward prevention and resilience—investing in ecosystem restoration, climate adaptation, and emissions reduction to curb escalating human, environmental, and economic damage.

Read more: 2025 One of Costliest Years for Climate Disasters: Report (Earth.Org)

Unequal Climate Burden

Africa’s minimal contribution to global emissions contrasts sharply with accelerating climate impacts that are reshaping livelihoods through heat, drought, floods, food insecurity, health risks, and large-scale displacement. Community-led restoration, farmer-managed natural regeneration, climate-smart agriculture, early warning systems, and expanding renewables are often overwhelmed by debt, inadequate climate finance, and rising loss-and-damage costs, making adaptation a race against worsening inequality.

Read more: YEAR-ENDER – How climate change has impacted Africa so far this century (Anadolu Agency)

Solar Tech Gamble

Private companies are advancing solar geoengineering plans—spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet—as a speculative response to accelerating climate impacts and stalled emissions cuts. However, these approaches raise concerns about profit-driven climate interventions, governance gaps, and the risk of entrenching technological fixes instead of restoring ecological balance through decarbonisation and systemic change.

Read more: Out of a superhero movie: Companies are coming up with plans to block out the sun (The Independent)

Ecological Rewiring

Climate change is revealed through an unexpected archive: decades-old military air samples showing that northern mosses now release spores up to a month earlier than in the 1990s, driven mainly by warmer conditions in the previous year. The finding underscores how living systems are quietly reorganising their rhythms in response to accumulated climatic change, offering new ways to observe long-term ecological adjustment rather than short-term disruption.

Read more: Scientists found climate change hidden in old military air samples (ScienceDaily)

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November 28, 2025

Biodiversity, Credibility, Community: This Week's Regeneration Research Digest

Biodiversity, Credibility, Community: This Week's Regeneration Research Digest

What the latest research reveals about regenerative practices

Across vineyards, scientific practice, agricultural finance, and rural communities, this week’s studies show that lasting ecological improvements depend on reconnecting ecology, knowledge, incentives, and social life.

Each piece highlights a part of this puzzle: vineyards where biodiversity rebounds when plant diversity returns; a call for biology to restore its integrative, natural-history foundations; carbon markets that can finance regenerative transitions when built on credibility and farmer benefit; and the social capital that ultimately determines whether regenerative practices endure. They remind us that regeneration works only when ecological design, epistemic balance, financial scaffolding, and social cohesion are aligned.

Dive into more details below:

  • Extensive vineyard management: Diverse groundcovers and reduced chemicals boost biodiversity and ecosystem services globally, amplified by semi-natural habitats.

  • Reclaiming biology’s core: A call to re-center natural history, taxonomy, and organismal insight as equal partners to modeling and molecular tools.

  • Carbon credits for regeneration: Credible carbon finance can turn regenerative agriculture into climate mitigation and rural livelihood infrastructure.

  • Regeneration is social: Trust, networks, and collective identity are the often-missing foundations enabling durable regenerative agriculture transitions.

Extensive Vineyard Management as a Nature-Based Solution

 

This Journal of Environmental Management review reframes vineyards, one of the world’s most pesticide-intensive farming systems, as a promising arena for nature-based solutions. Synthesizing 822 datasets from 221 studies across global wine regions, the authors show that extensive vineyard practices—vegetation cover, reduced pesticides, diverse cover crops—boost biodiversity and ecosystem services by an average of 14.2% compared to intensive management.

The meta-analysis highlights how reintroducing plant diversity into vineyard inter-rows catalyzes ecological recovery. High-diversity cover crops deliver the strongest gains, enhancing carbon sequestration (+37.8%), erosion control (+26.4%), soil fertility (+19.9%), and natural pest control (+16.4%). Crucially, the study positions vineyards within broader landscapes: semi-natural habitats act as amplifiers, significantly strengthening the positive effects of extensive management, especially for pest control, by serving as refuges and source habitats for beneficial species. The article ultimately argues that viticulture’s environmental footprint can be reduced not through technological fixes, but through ecological design: diverse groundcovers, fewer chemicals, and landscapes stitched with natural habitat.

Read more: Extensive vineyard management and semi-natural habitats increase biodiversity and ecosystem services: insights from a global meta-analysis (Journal of Environmental Management)

Reclaiming Biology’s Integrative Core

 

This essay argues that contemporary biology risks hollowing out its core by surrendering too much to the reductionist logics of mathematics and chemistry. The author critiques how ecological modeling, genomics, sequencing, and metabarcoding, while powerful, have come to dominate biodiversity research at the expense of natural history, taxonomy, and organismal understanding. The result is a field in which elegant equations and vast molecular datasets are mistaken for knowledge, even as species-level understanding erodes under the “taxonomic impediment.”

The article traces this drift to a hierarchy of prestige: predictive models and molecular tools are valorized, while descriptive, field-based, and contextual approaches are dismissed as old-fashioned. It highlights the dangers of substituting models, imputed traits, expert opinion, and machine-generated sequences for empirical observation—surrogates that risk reifying guesses as facts.

The essay calls for a rebalancing: reviving taxonomy, reintegrating molecular and ecological insights within holistic frameworks, prioritizing scenario building over rigid prediction, and embracing uncertainty and contingency—the very qualities that define living systems. Training and publishing structures must shift away from hyperspecialization so that biology can once again connect genes, organisms, and ecosystems within a unified natural history.

Read more: Biodiversity Is Neither Mathematics nor Chemistry (SCIRES-IT Special Issue)

Carbon Credits as Agricultural Infrastructure

 

This chapter, in the book Carbon-Negative Agriculture within the series of Sustainability Sciences in Asia and Africa (SAFS), frames regenerative agriculture (RA) as a core strategy for achieving carbon-negative farming systems across Asia and Africa. Against a backdrop of severe soil carbon loss and accelerating ecological degradation, RA is presented as a holistic approach rooted in minimizing disturbance, maintaining soil cover, increasing biodiversity, retaining living roots, and integrating livestock. These principles rebuild soil organic carbon, enhance water and nutrient cycles, and strengthen resilience to climate extremes.

A central contribution of the chapter is its detailed account of carbon credits and ecosystem service payments as financial mechanisms to scale RA. By outlining the full carbon credit pipeline—baseline assessments, digital MRV, verification, and participation in voluntary carbon markets—the authors show how carbon finance can create new revenue streams for smallholder farmers. Bundling credits with yield insurance, linking RA to corporate insetting, and aligning practices with national climate commitments further broaden the incentive landscape.

Technological tools—AI-driven carbon modeling, drones and IoT soil sensors, variable-rate input technologies, biochar, and microbial biostimulants—are positioned as essential to lowering monitoring costs and ensuring credible carbon accounting. Combined with supportive policies, localized frameworks, and farmer training, these interventions aim to transform agriculture into a driver of ecological restoration, rural prosperity, and climate mitigation across the regions highlighted in the SAFS series.

Read more: Policies and Technological Intervention for Regenerative Agriculture and Carbon Credits to Achieve Carbon-Negative Agriculture (Carbon-Negative Agriculture)

Regeneration Is Social

 

This Discover Agriculture review reframes regenerative agriculture by shifting attention from soils and yields to the social capital that makes regenerative transitions possible. Synthesizing 43 studies from an initial pool of nearly 400, the authors show that trust, networks, shared norms, and collective action are not peripheral—they are the infrastructure that sustains knowledge exchange, experimentation, and long-term adoption of regenerative practices.

Across diverse contexts, the review finds that social capital shapes RA through five interconnected dimensions:

  • knowledge exchange and learning systems;

  • community building and collective identity;

  • trust and relationship quality;

  • participation; and

  • organizational networks.

These relational dynamics determine whether farmers access new ideas, innovate collectively, build resilience, and engage with institutions. Yet despite their importance, the authors argue, social dynamics remain inconsistently integrated into RA policy, research, and evaluation frameworks. By positioning social capital as foundational rather than secondary, the article urges a more holistic view of regenerative transitions—one that treats community cohesion, peer networks, and local governance as critical drivers of ecological restoration.

Read more: Beyond soil and yields: a systematic review of social capital’s role in regenerative agriculture (Discover Agriculture)

 

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This Week's Regeneration in the Headlines
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