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The recipe for NR3

  • ianthornhill0
  • Nov 29, 2024
  • 10 min read

Updated: Jan 9

You may well be interested to know more about what our degree contains and why. This blog is intended specifically for that purpose, but with a little more insight from our programme directors.


"Perhaps the most exciting thing about the degree is it's social-ecological positioning. We want to inspire people to be great negotiators with confidence in their ecological understanding."

Ian Thornhill


The compulsory course units that comprise the degree are sourced from the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED), between the Planning, Property and Environmental Management (PPEM) and Geography departments. However, the optional units that allow students to personalise their degree and explore other NR3 perspectives are sourced from across the Faculty of Humanities and beyond (Table 1).


Table 1 MSC NR3 Core Course Units (clickable)


More information will be provided on our official University of Manchester courses pages (here), but below we give the overview of each of the compulsory modules, and even further below, you'll find the same for our exciting range of optional units. Students on the MSc NR3 will pick one optional unit per semester.


People and Nature

"The People and Nature module will be an amazing opportunity to listen to and discuss a diverse set of worldviews and perspectives on the relationship between humans and the more than human world"

Ian Thornhill


To address the biodiversity crisis we need a paradigm shift in the co-existence of people and nature. The People and Nature course unit draws on multi-disciplinary experts to explore some of the contemporary philosophical, ethical, moral and practical debates and dilemmas confronting the imperative for transformative change for nature. Join us, and our external speakers, to embark on an engaging yet challenging journey exploring diverse perspectives on the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world.


The course content will blend philosophy and ethics with specialisms spanning sociology, economics, politics, natural resource management and ecology. The course unit launches with introductory sessions that provide the theoretical and conceptual context for understanding the nature-people nexus. The remaining sessions then welcome a variety of guest speakers to provide inspirational ‘soap-box’ lectures that will encourage you to question, challenge and re-evaluate preconceptions about people and nature. Each of the guest lectures will be followed by an interactive workshop, where you will be invited to discuss and debate relevant topics, present and ‘perform’ (through role-play) diverse perspectives on challenging topics and develop skills in co-production, public participation and persuasive communication. The unit concludes with a session that reviews and reflects across the taught material to develop transdisciplinary perspectives. The People and Nature course unit will enable you to challenge conventional wisdom, cultivate critical thinking skills, and to develop nuanced, balanced and inclusive perspectives about our collective responsibility towards nature's restoration and our ethical obligations to future generations.


Planning for Nature Recovery

"Understanding the diverse political, policy and legislative landscape that applies to NR3 is pivotal. Even more important, is how to interact and apply it to achieve gains for biodiversity. This is the aim of Planning for Nature Recovery."

Ian Thornhill


It is widely acknowledged that traditional approaches to nature conservation have failed to reverse losses in biodiversity i.e., bend the curve. To reverse declines in biodiversity, a set of approaches to enhancing biodiversity have emerged under the auspices of the nature positive agenda to realise net gains in biodiversity through the decisions society makes. Nature recovery is one such approach aimed at building resilient landscapes through natural restoration and nature-based solutions, often through exploiting land-use policy mechanisms. In the context of the NR3 degree, nature recovery may be considered an over-arching approach that considers environmental restoration and rewilding as alternative or complementary approaches to enhancing biodiversity across landscapes.


Central to this course unit is how planning and land-use policy can support nature recovery. While the phrase ‘nature recovery’ has been adopted into UK policy, the principles here apply internationally. A series of lectures will provide historical context for nature recovery and the nature positive agenda (and thus the MSc more widely) by exploring conventional approaches to nature conservation. There will also be a series of lectures and workshops that establish some of the current parameters within which nature recovery approaches must operate, or that must be amended to realise a nature positive future. This includes introductions to planning systems and examples of associated nature recovery policies, and agri-environmental schemes and farm management. Similarly, nature recovery will also be considered in sectors of industry not typically considered when attempting to recover biodiversity, which includes national and multinational corporations and the extraction industries (e.g., mining, forestry). The role and influence of the general public as critical stakeholders will be explored in each instance.


The different approaches to nature recovery will be explored through a residential field visit, with students exposed to different approaches to nature recovery being implemented across and urban to rural gradient (e.g., urban and non-urban rewilding, biodiversity net-gain, regenerative agriculture). The field visit will be an opportunity to learn and apply basic field skills to assess and map ecological condition of frequently encountered habitats.


Rewilding: Principles and Practice

"Nature conservation has to embrace transformative approaches if we are going to reverse the biodiversity crisis, and rewilding, arguably holds the most potential to do this. This unit will explore rewilding using diverse theoretical and practical perspectives, considering ecological, socio-cultural and economic dimensions"

Anna Gilchrist


Rewilding is the radical new science aiming to restore natural processes, increase ecological and trophic complexity and establish more resilient ecosystems. Rewilding also holds enormous potential in transforming the relationships that people have with nature. Although it is perhaps the most exciting and innovative solution being proposed to help address the biodiversity crisis, in many situations it remains controversial and contested.


In this course unit, students delve into the interdisciplinary science of rewilding, learning about the ecological principles and practical applications that underpin the restoration of natural processes, alongside recognising the social, cultural, economic and political opportunities and challenges that rewilding poses. The unit begins by exploring the foundational concepts of rewilding, emphasising the restoration of natural processes, the importance of ecological and trophic complexity and core landscape-ecology principles including the importance of scale and connectivity. Commensurate with the ecological focus, students are also immersed in the social dimensions of rewilding, considering the implications of rewilding for culture, heritage, land-based economies, livelihoods, policy and politics. This explores the collaborations and conflicts between stakeholders with diverse perspectives, including local communities, conservation organisations and policymakers.


To gain a comprehensive understanding of the complexities inherent in rewilding principles and practice, this course unit adopts a ‘flipped classroom’ approach, where core knowledge is developed through engaging, asynchronous learning that draws on a wide range of international case-studies. This content is then discussed in weekly interactive workshops designed to enhance skills in critical thinking and embed interdisciplinary and pluralistic perspectives. Additionally, knowledge is also applied through computer sessions and field visits, where students learn core practical skills to implement both the ecological and social requirements of rewilding and reflect on how these play out in real-world situations.


Environmental Restoration

“One of our best tools for confronting urgent global environmental challenges is ecological restoration”

Peter Raven (2013)


Anthropogenic activities have profoundly altered environments and ecosystems at all scales from local to global, and the human aspiration to live sustainably has led to attempts to more effectively manage environments and ecosystems to prevent future degradation. Crucially however, there is now clear recognition that we also require active restoration of damaged environments and ecosystems to provide greater resilience to climate and biodiversity change and associated environmental pressures such as increased flood frequency, water resource availability, food security, etc.


Environmental Restoration can be defined as the process of assisting the recovery of an environment or ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed, and as a term is often used interchangeably with Ecological Restoration. Environmental restoration is increasingly recognised as a practical application of our knowledge of earth surface processes and environmental change, for example through advising environmental managers on river restoration or coastal management schemes for flood defence.


This course reviews the principles and concepts of environmental restoration before critically evaluating a range of examples, focusing throughout on the science and monitoring that that underpin and inform restoration practice.


Methods for Ecological Analysis

"Understanding what comprises good evidence is a critical skill for any practitioner or researcher. Methods for Ecological Analysis does exactly what it say on the tin and will enable students to critique the evidence before them."

Ian Thornhill


Evidence comes in many forms, both quantitative e.g., numbers, and qualitative e.g., expert opinion, and all have value provided that they are robustly and objectively collected and analysed. Such evidence is critical to demonstrate the effectiveness or not of interventions, or to inform decision-making and policy development. Consequently, to realise the transformative change needed in conservation, and when implementing interventions that are in themselves contested or in locations where they may be considered controversial, the evidence base must be convincing.


Students on NR3 will have encountered a range of methodological approaches during Semester 1. The present module will begin by reviewing and recapping those previously covered. Thereafter, the course unit will consolidate, and compliment knowledge previously learned to set into context the toolkit of approaches available to data generation in social-ecological studies. Thus, qualitative and quantitative analyses will be introduced and reviewed for their role in evidence generation, with an emphasis on mixed-method approaches.


Students taking the course unit will broadly follow the scientific process: observing and questioning, identifying research areas, generating hypotheses, experimental set ups, data analysis, reporting results. A central theory will be the reduction of uncertainty and thus, the sources of uncertainty in data collection and analysis e.g., reduction of error and redundancy in data collection and handling. Throughout the unit, students will be encouraged to consider their dissertation topics during this process by identifying which methods they may wish to employ / are feasible given the topic of interest.


Nature Positive Field Tour

Image credit: Luigi Fillice


"What does success look like? The Nature Positive Field Tour is an opportunity for students to experience restoring ecosystems, and to be taken on a showcase of successful projects across the spectrum of nature positive approaches"

Anna Gilchrist


A key barrier to the restoration of wild nature is the inability to imagine it; Shifting Baseline Syndrome means that humans all too readily accept an impoverished state of nature from previous generations because we cannot see what existed before our lifetimes. One of the most important tools in the armoury of transformative conservation is therefore exposing students to the inspiration and awe that wild nature and functioning ecosystems can engender, and to demonstrate the positive trajectory of ecosystems where practical projects are delivering nature recovery, restoration and rewilding. In addition to inspiration, exposing students to projects that are delivering these nature positive solutions, also provides the opportunity for developing critical knowledge and skills in research and monitoring. As transformative conservation methods become more mainstream, there is going to be an increasing demand for measuring their ‘success’, in ecological terms, but also calculating the socio-economic and wider environmental benefits.


The purpose of the Nature Positive Field Tour is therefore two-fold: 1) to expose students to inspirational examples of transformative conservation in action and to demonstrate the awe that wilder ecosystems can instil, and 2) to provide students with the knowledge and practical skills in research and monitoring of nature positive solutions that span the natural and social sciences. Pre-field tour sessions expose students to the breadth of techniques available for undertaking research on transformative conservation, enabling them to design and implement independent research in the field, while embedding an understanding of ethics into their research practices. The field tour itself, then allows students to consolidate their learning on a variety of research methods and explore opportunities for monitoring the impacts or trajectory of nature positive interventions. Finally, students will also have the opportunity to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of undertaking research in the field.


Dissertation

"A huge opportunity to delve deeper into a subject that inspires you. Work on your own idea, developed with an academic supervisor, or potentially engage with a range of external mentors!"

Ian Thornhill


Students on Postgraduate Masters degree programmes within the Department of Planning, Property and Environmental Management are required to prepare a dissertation of 12,000 words on an agreed topic. This unit provides students with an opportunity to both synthesise existing scholarly work and conduct their own research, thereby contributing novel insights to the field of nature recovery, restoration or rewilding. Students are free to consider a wide range of relevant topics, subject to approval on the basis of advisory expertise from staff in the Department of Planning, Property and Environmental Management and the feasibility of undertaking the topic within the timescale of the programme.


The process of conducting an independent research project and writing a dissertation involves identifying a research problem, proposing a research aim and objectives/questions, reviewing existing literature, selecting appropriate methodologies, collecting and analysing data, presenting findings in a coherent manner and discussing the implications of the findings in the context of existing literature. Throughout this unit, students will get the opportunity to develop advanced research capabilities, enhance their critical thinking, and improve their writing, communication and presentation skills, all of which are essential for both academic and professional success. Upon completion of their dissertation, students will have not only produced a substantial piece of academic work but also developed a deep understanding of their chosen topic. This enhances their expertise in their field and prepares them for future academic pursuits or professional careers.


Optional Units


We're incredibly pleased to be able to offer NR3 students optional unit from a range of different departments and schools including PPEM and Geography, as well as Earth Sciences, the Global Development Institute (GDI), the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC) and Economics (Table 2). It may also be possible to negotiate access to other courses from across the university in liaison with Anna and/or Ian and other academic staff. Follow the links to find out more information on the University of Manchester web pages.


Table 2 Optional Course Units for MSc NR3 students

For those modules due for relaunch in 2025/26 (*) we have a little preview below:


Spatial Ecology

Watch this space!


Natural Heritage

It provides students with both theoretical and professional knowledge and understanding of the concept and practice of natural heritage. The course provides a historical and contemporary analysis of the concept of natural heritage and its manifestations and applications in diverse cultural and geographical contexts. In particular, the course explores the interrelation between making, using, representing and managing different sites and environments of natural heritage. This includes an analysis of political, governmental, social and financial factors in defining and valuing natural heritage. The course considers different sites of natural heritage, including water-based sites, parks, forests, gardens etc. Similarly, it examines issues of authenticity, conservation, sustainable development, tourism and considers the impact of resources, skills and funding on natural heritage management and use. The understanding of natural heritage is deliberately broad, in order to identify commonalities and specificities across a breadth of disciplinary, organizational and professional models.


Each week focuses on a key concept and includes also student-led activities, fieldwork and professional presentations. The idea is to stimulate critical reflection, as well as enable students to acquire nuanced and contextualized knowledge and understanding of some of the key intellectual, ethical, professional and political questions posed by, and of, natural heritage.


...AND FINALLY!!!


As ever, if you have further questions, please please contact Ian (ian.thornhill@manchester.ac.uk) or Anna (anna.gilchrist@manchester.ac.uk), or both! For example, to ask about assessment types, part-time study, field trips.....

 
 
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