Hannah Hamilton

hannah

Hannah is a Director at éirewild Ltd (www.eirewild.ie), an environmental sustainability and communications consultancy that works with businesses, NGOs, community groups, State Agencies and Government departments to help make space for nature. A former writer and editor, she rediscovered her love for the natural world upon inheriting a small conservation project on the River Nore in Co. Kilkenny and returned to education, achieving a first class BSc (Hons) in Environmental and Natural Resource Management at LIT Tipperary. Her part-time MSc by Research at Trinity builds on her interests in mainstreaming biodiversity conservation throughout society, with a focus on the private sector.

PhD project: Corporate Biodiversity Governance: Understanding the drivers and impacts of voluntary on-site biodiversity action by businesses.

Businesses impact and depend on the natural world, and biodiversity loss presents significant and material business risks. Growing numbers of companies are taking voluntary action for biodiversity outside traditional regulatory and legal requirements, and one approach is via on-site biodiversity management. The UK Wildlife Trusts’ Biodiversity Benchmark is a voluntary certification scheme for business that recognises and rewards continual biodiversity improvement at site-level. To date, 18 companies (55 sites) from a variety of business sectors in the UK have been certified under the scheme. This project uses social science methods (semi-structured interviews and surveys) to explore the businesses drivers of voluntary action for biodiversity through the Benchmark, determine the business impacts across sector and company size, and explore stakeholder perceptions of the impacts on biodiversity. The project aims to inform policy, Corporate Social Responsibility strategies, and other initiatives that engage businesses with biodiversity.