Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions
November 2024

Biodiversity Is Not a Luxury: Unpacking Wealth and Power to Accommodate the Complexity of Urban Biodiversity

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Biodiversity Is Not a Luxury: Unpacking Wealth and Power to Accommodate the Complexity of Urban Biodiversity cover

A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect.” We contend that both this language and this framing restrict our understanding of how sociopolitical power dynamics influence biodiversity within and across cities. We describe how the term “luxury” is not appropriately applied to describe patterns of biodiversity and how the pattern depends on the form(s) of biodiversity investigated. We propose an alternate framework, the POSE framework, that examines the Power, Objectives, mediating Socioecological context, and Effort of specific actors and how those may influence biodiversity.