Stakeholders’ Assessment of Goals, Co-Benefits, Barriers and Enablers to Urban Biodiversity, 2023

Despite the increasing importance and attention paid to the issue of delivering biodiversity, less attention has been given to how biodiversity will be protected and enhanced during developed and redevelopment in an urban context. This data set is part of the BiUrbs project. It details stakeholder’s rankings of importance of various goals, co-benefits, barriers and enablers related to delivery of biodiversity in urban contexts through new development. It was designed to generate a better understanding of the relative importance of the wide range of factors that might influence biodiversity delivery in urban development and redevelopment.

To approach this question, we employed the Delphi methodology of stakeholder assessment with controlled feedback. This entailed 1) the synthesis of potential goals, co-benefits, barriers and enablers from existing literature and a stakeholder workshop 2) the assessment of these for importance via a survey 3) the re-assessment of these through a second survey in which participants were provided with the median importance score from the first round. The results of this second round are provided here. Our assessment used medians of this second round as the assessment of importance and the interquartile range as the assessment of consensus between participants. Participants were stakeholders in the built environment across construction, planning local government, housing associations and environmental consultants.

The Delphi method is a structured communication process that aims to generate insight regarding current or future challenges. It is particularly useful in situations where there is lack of readily available information on the current challenge as whole (Beiderbeck et al, 2021). These methods are used to promote the generation of a reliable consensus viewpoint from stakeholders where possible and capturing differences of opinion between panel members.

Beiderbeck D., et al. Preparing, conducting, and analyzing Delphi surveys: Cross-disciplinary practices, new directions, and advancements. MethodsX. 2021;8:101401.