Sustainability Week: Measuring Your Biodiversity Footprint Workshop

What’s your biodiversity footprint? Where does it begin and end? And how might you measure it, or make strategic decisions based on how your everyday life impacts biodiversity?

In 2022, the University of Melbourne took the Nature Positive Pledge as a founding member of the Nature Positive Universities Alliance. The University had begun setting its benchmark through a Biodiversity Baseline Data Project, focused on on-campus biodiversity – but what about the University’s entire life, investments, and value chain – the supply chain of goods and services the university purchases? How did they impact biodiversity? To address this gap, the University of Melbourne's Sustainability Strategy team invited the Melbourne Biodiversity Institute to lead a comprehensive, institution- wide biodiversity footprint and materiality assessment of nature-related pressures and dependencies.

So how did they do it? And what does it mean? In this hour and a half workshop that includes lunch, Institute experts Sam Hickman and Prof Brendan Wintle talk about the biodiversity footprinting work they did for the University. They will work with participants to help you model your day-to-day biodiversity footprint, and help participants understand how you can participate in systems that can make biodiversity footprint changes much larger than you might imagine.

Presenters:

Brendan Wintle is Professor in Biodiversity Conservation and Director of the Melbourne Biodiversity Institute at the University of Melbourne. He develops economic methods to support conservation decisions and policy. He has been Director of Australia’s Threatened Species Recovery Research Hub and UN IPBES coordinating lead author. He teaches Applied Ecology, Global Environmental Change, and 1st year Biology. He serves on the Zoos Victoria Board and was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Victoria. He publishes on biodiversity assessment, monitoring and reporting design, cost-efficient conservation spending, and species loss under environmental change. He has held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and was theme leader of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. Brendan is a Lead Councillor on Australia’s Biodiversity Council. He harbours strange obsessions with a gliding marsupial called the greater glider, spider orchids, playing football (with a round ball), and watching Tigers play the ovoid ball version. He once met the Queen and Michael Parkinson in the same week, but was too polite to admit he was a republican.

Sam Hickman is a Research Associate and Project Manager at the Melbourne Biodiversity Institute, where he specialises in helping large organisations measure and understand their environmental impacts on nature. In his role as Project Manager, he has developed assessment tools that enable the University of Melbourne and other institutions to quantify how their value chains both impact and depend on nature. As a Research Associate, Sam has led projects for large financial institutions, including NAB and Franklin Templeton, providing expertise to help these organisations better understand and manage their nature-related impacts and dependencies. In addition to his research work, Sam serves on the Youth Advisory Council on International Climate Change with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW). In this capacity, he contributes to shaping federal climate policy at both national and international levels, ensuring that the perspectives and interests of young people are integrated into policy development to promote intergenerational equity.

Participating in Green Impact? Complete these toolkit actions by participating (teams/individuals):

• Sustainability Week 2025: You have attended an event as part of Sustainability Week (30 points!)

• Discover the actions under the 'Biodiversity' theme filter

• UOM016/UOM-I08: You have attended an event run by the Sustainability Team

• UOM011 & S019/UOM-I02 & UOM-I03: You have shared your involvement in Sustainability Week via social media and/or interacted with one of the Sustainability Delivery Team's communication channels

• UOM018/UOM-I07: You have written an article for the Green Impact newsletter based on your participation in Sustainability Week.