Hassan Aftab

@hassanaftab.bsky.social  & co-authors conducted a systematic review @cellpress.bsky.social , identified four persistent barriers:
- Limited financial returns
- High risk and uncertainty
- High transaction costs
- Undervaluation of nature

How to unlock private finance for nature: reframing risk-return dynamics Nature-related projects to protect, manage, or restore the Earth’s ecosystems are vital if we are to maintain a liveable planet, yet these projects cannot be funded at the required scale by public finance alone. In my research at the Oxford Smith School, I explore how we can unlock private capital to help replenish the natural world. 

"It is critical to mobilise financial resources to support projects that explicitly target the conservation, sustainable management, (...) on which human life depends." @hassanaftab.bsky.social :

Unlocking private finance for nature: Addressing barriers and reframing risk-return dynamics Environmental science; Nature conservation; Natural resources; Economics

The financial system is designed to maximise commercial risk–return trade-offs, not ecological integrity. If we want to unlock private finance for nature, we need to rethink what risk and return actually mean in a planetary context.

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/we-mapp...

The FLAME dataset provides farm-level geospatial and tabular data products that map agricultural landholdings and ownership structures across England. Developed to support environmental policy, nature finance, and agri-environmental modeling, FLAME integrates multiple open data sources into a harmonised spatial database of farmed assets. This version (v2.0) includes detailed information on: ● Farm boundaries derived from spatial overlays of land parcels. ● Ownership boundaries associated with registered titles. ● Cropping and land use attributes sourced from annual returns. ● Matched farm-business entities using natural language processing and rule-based entity matching. ● Aggregated indicators on area, land use types, and overlaps between ownership and farm. ● Metadata on administrative districts and relevant environmental overlays. Key features: ● Combines Rural Payments Agency (RPA) land parcel data, HM Land Registry ownership polygons, and June Agricultural Census statistics. ● Includes NLP-enhanced entity resolution for linking farm and ownership entities. ● Provides geospatial fields including SBI-level farm areas, ownership-perimeter overlaps, and crop-specific land use. ● Useful for asset-level emissions accounting, biodiversity mapping, regulatory targeting, and financial risk analysis.

A Field-Level Asset Mapping Dataset for England's Agricultural Sector doi.org/10.1038/s415... paper by @hassanaftab.bsky.social et al

Dataset doi.org/10.5281/zeno... (CC-SA)

Blog post www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/we-mapp...

#farmdata #opendata #landuse #biodiversity

A Field-Level Asset Mapping Dataset for England’s Agricultural Sector - Scientific Data Scientific Data - A Field-Level Asset Mapping Dataset for England’s Agricultural Sector

NEW PAPER ALERT!

Our paper titled 'A Field-Level Asset Mapping Dataset for England’s Agricultural Sector' has been published in Scientific Data.

It is the first known effort to produce an open-source farm-level dataset for England

@smithschool.ox.ac.uk

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

University of Oxford’s APAD Uses AWS to Improve Air Quality and Aid Communities with ML | Case Study | AWS Learn how the University of Oxford’s APAD is advancing air pollution research with ML pipelines powered by Amazon EC2 instances.

Here's a case study of our recent work on air pollution in the IGP region by AWS

aws.amazon.com/solutions/ca...

Brick Kiln Dataset for Pakistan’s IGP Region Using AI - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Brick Kiln Dataset for Pakistan’s IGP Region Using AI

NEW PAPER ALERT!

Happy to announce that the a paper I've been supervising has just been published in scientific data!

It provides an open source dataset of the brick kilns in Pakistan's IGP region with implications for air pollution and bonded labour

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

'Really suffocating': Pakistan emerges from record smog season Tens of millions of Pakistanis spent at least four months breathing toxic air pollution 20 times above safe levels, in the worst winter smog season for several years, according to data analysed by AFP...

Lahore has no day where the air quality meets WHO guidelines this year. Little has been done despite have multiple data points

www.france24.com/en/live-news...

No delay of reporting requirements: "Postpone present enforcement and sanctioning measures (not the reporting requirements including ESRS) until legal uncertainties are resolved." 3/3

"Reduce the amount of mandatory data points in terms of their meaningfulness and proportionality to outcome and costs" 2/n

The German Government's Sustainable Finance Advisory Committee has published its position on the hashtag #omnibus.

They position to have alear commitment to double materiality: "The EU should take a leading role to shape and extend the international baseline" 1/n

However, without clear regulation and standardised metrics, biodiversity finance remains fragmented.

#NatureFinance #BiodiversityFinance #TNFD #FinanceForNature

while $7 trillion still flows into activities that harm ecosystems.

Investors are stepping up, with biodiversity-focused funds doubling to $3.7 billion, and innovative models like habitat banks creating investable nature assets. 2/n

Biodiversity is finally getting the financial attention it deserves, but is it enough?

Biodiversity finance has risen to $208bn a year from $166bn three years ago!

Over $58 trillion of global GDP depends on nature, yet the biodiversity financing gap stands at $700 billion annually 1/n

anyone here who's an economist and can help me understand efficient frontier? please inbox

Here's a link for those interested royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

New paper by Wauchope et al. (2024) dives into the complexities of biodiversity credits

Key takeaways:
🟢 Standardising biodiversity into a single ‘unit’ is deeply challenging.
⚠️ Risks of additionality, leakage & permanence remain unsolved.
❓Should credits offset harm or simply fund nature recovery?

Got to capture this beautiful sunset yesterday!

#Oxford #sunset

Muhammad Suleman Ali Hamdani, Khizer Zakir, Neetu Kushwaha, Syeda Eman Fatima, Hassan Aftab Sheikh
Brick Kiln Dataset for Pakistan's IGP Region Using AI
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00052

This is how much the $300 billion agreed in #NCQG would be worth in 2035, losing 1/3rd of its value. The adopted text should be rightly rejected by all developing states #COP29 #finance #climatefinance

Hi everyone!

I would love to connect with people working on the nature-climate-air pollution nexus on here.

A bit about me: I am currently a fellow in #naturefinance at @universityofoxford.bsky.social and am trained as a #geologist

Happy to connect with people with similar interests!

The Nature-Climate nexus at COP29 Dr Hassan Aftab Sheikh writes on the emergence of nature finance as a critical topic in global policy discussions.

I write about the Nature-Climate nexus at #COP29 where a fundamental challenge facing nature finance lies in overcoming risk-related bottlenecks that deter investment.

www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/nature-...

Pakistan govt has now declared a health emergency and announced a lockdown in cities of Lahore and Multan

Ad-hoc lockdowns like these shows governance failures
The question still stands: what is the govt doing to reduce pollutants from known sources?
Photo: @asssociatedpress.bsky.social

#cop29