Rohit Kaushish

Rohit Kaushish is the Chief Economic Advisor at the National Farmers’ Union. Rohit oversees a team of economists, statisticians and rural experts to develop and communicate the economic policy of the NFU. Key areas of focus include measures to manage agricultural market volatility, enhance productivity and promote environmental delivery. With a background in finance and ecological economics, specific areas of interest include investigating how the agri-food chain, natural capital approaches, net zero transition, environmental markets and government initiatives can support the resilience of the agricultural sector and food systems.

Vassilis Gkoumas

Vassilis Gkoumas is leading WWF-UK’s workstream on the nature-positive economy and sectoral transitions. He is an environmental economist focusing on policy design and evaluation, as well as on government advocacy.
 

Henry Leveson-Gower

Henry Leveson-Gower is founder and CEO of Promoting Economic Pluralism and Director of New Economic Knowledge Services, its consultancy arm.  He works to open up thinking and action on economic organisation to different perspectives through editing and publishing The Mint Magazine and supporting innovative action on the ground. He is working with a range of landscape regeneration projects to support innovative collaborative multi-stakeholder approaches that gain private funding while also being adaptive over the long term to changing science, policy and circumstances.  This approach developed from his time as a research fellow at the Centre for Evaluating Complexity Across the Nexus at the University of Surrey in 2017, where he worked with leading experts to explore emerging social and institutional models for landscape management.  He has a wealth of experience as an economist and policy analyst seeking practical solutions to address complex and uncertain challenges in environmental policy particularly in the food and land sectors.  He is a Fellow of the RSA and a qualified chartered accountant.

Constance McDermott

Dr. Constance L. McDermott is an Associate Professor and Jackson Senior Fellow at Oriel College and the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. She is also leader of ECI's Land Society and Governance Programme. Her work spans the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa and addresses the linkages among diverse local, regional and global priorities for land use, forests, and climate mitigation and adaptation. She examines both new and old institutions of land use governance, from market-based initiatives such as forest and carbon certification to sovereign state-based and traditional community-based approaches, to better understand how dynamics of trust and power shape environmental and social policies and facilitate or inhibit desired outcomes. Recent research directions include the study of carbon and natural capital markets, and supply chain policies, such as the EUDR, and their intersection with food security, as well as alternative and community-based approaches.

Join us Monday 2 June from 4-5:30pm at the Oxford Martin School's lecture theatre for the panel discussion "Counting on Nature: How should we value nature in our food systems?"

Natural systems underpinning food production are being degraded at an unprecedented rate, with a rapid loss of biodiversity and an average temperature rise of almost 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels in 2023.  Most economists believe that these problems have arisen because the value of nature is not adequately reflected in policy and economic decision-making.

But what is nature's value? Some may view it as merely another economic asset, while others appreciate it in terms of identity, aesthetics, and even spiritual significance.  Can these values be incorporated into decision-making without diminishing the richness and diversity of our relationships with nature?  Can we forge markets in nature and categorise it as a type of capital without depleting our relationship with the environment, even if it acquires a nominal monetary value?  Can we commodify nature into tradable units while still acknowledging that much of the value of ecosystems arises from interconnections and networks?

Expert economists’ views on how to appropriately factor nature into decision-making vary considerably, with two main groups of environmental and ecological economists.  

The former focuses on translating nature’s values into economic terms and creating nature markets, which many pragmatic environmentalists support, if only because they believe that money influences politicians.  This approach has been institutionalised in Global North governments’ decision-making through cost-benefit analysis and derives from the neo-classical school of economic thinking that dominates economic teaching and research.

The latter emphasises the need for dialogue about nature's values and changes in the political-economic system to reflect nature's importance and create fairer outcomes.  They draw on non-mainstream economic thinking, which places greater focus on political-economic interactions and power inequalities.  These experts are supported by environmental justice organisations, who fear a continuation of green colonialism as the Global North seeks to greenwash the persistence of their destructive economic systems.

This event will be hosted both in-person at Oxford Martin School and also online. The panel of speakers will use the recently published explainer Making Nature Count: How should we value nature in our food systems? (by Henry Leveson-Gower) as a starting point to explore the implications of these different approaches as they apply to valuing and funding natural regeneration in the context of transforming food systems.

Confirmed Panelists:

• Rohit Kaushish, Chief Economics Advisor, National Farmers' Union
• Constance McDermott, Associate Professor and Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Land Use and Environmental Change, Oriel College and the Environmental Change Institute at University of Oxford
• Vassilis Gkoumas, Economist, WWF-UK
• Henry Leveson-Gower, Founder & CEO, Promoting Economic Pluralism