Research investigating the relationship between wealth and ecosystem health

New research provides a more complex understanding of how wealth and biodiversity are linked, suggesting that communities with less wealth can achieve the levels of diversity typically associated with wealthier regions. suggests that it may be useful.

The paper, “Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to adapt to the complexity of urban biodiversity,” was published in the journal Ecosystems.

Researchers have long understood that richer regions tend to have higher biodiversity, a phenomenon known as the “luxury effect.” But the mechanisms by which wealth is converted into biodiversity are relatively unstudied, said Madhusudan Katti, an associate professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University. Katti, senior author of a paper on the study, said viewing biodiversity as a luxury would undermine people’s agency in creating it.

“Biodiversity is not a luxury; it is something that cities can strive to cultivate,” Katti said. “It is not just a passive by-product of wealth. Rather than relying solely on the correlation between wealth and biodiversity, we want to understand the different ways in which biodiversity intersects with different social pressures and systems. That’s what I thought.

To do this, the researchers started with the land itself. By first analyzing the common characteristics of biodiversity areas, we were able to work backwards to uncover the processes that promote biodiversity and the social structures that enable those processes to occur. Katti calls this a socio-ecological framework, which considers how nature is shaped by human actions in social contexts.

“Socially, there are actors who make decisions about land use and management,” Katti said. “Someone decides how the land is used, whether the city decides where to put a park or industrial land. And then there are the individuals who decide in their backyards what to do with that land, whether to turn it into a lawn or not. Pollinators. It’s a nice garden or something.”

These decisions are part of what the study calls the POSE framework. Rather than relying on descriptors such as “luxury,” this framework focuses on four social factors that determine how individuals, community groups, or organizations influence biodiversity: power; Describes the purpose, social/ecological context, and approach (POSE).

Each part of the framework represents a point of influence that communities can leverage to build biodiversity, which may explain the luxury effect. For example, someone who is wealthier and owns a home will have more influence over the landscape of their property than someone who lives in an apartment complex. Using the POSE framework, less affluent communities can find ways to leverage the resources they have, including focusing on increasing their efforts through collective organizing.

Katti hopes the POSE framework will help inspire people to work towards healthier landscapes in their communities.

“We want people to understand that even if they don’t have a lot of money, they can have an impact on the landscape around them,” Katti said. “This is what community groups have been doing for a long time. They are organizing to overcome wealth handicaps through hard work. Our paper is a call to action. Biodiversity is achievable. And people have the power to create it together.”

The paper’s lead author is Renata Poulton Kamakula of Duke University. This paper was co-authored by Jin Bai and Dr. Vallari Sheel. student at North Carolina State University.