Welcome to the final thesis presentation of Harry Cook! Biodiversity-Related Physical Risk Transmission in Social-Ecological Systems: A Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping of Expert Perspectives Supervisors: Garry Peterson, Anne-Sophie Crépin; Expert Reviewer: Juan Rocha; Examiner: Tim Daw Biodiversity degradation is weakening the resilience of social-ecological systems and creating risks for the real economy and financial system. As central bank and financial supervisors increasingly seek to assess biodiversity-related financial risk, important questions remain about how biodiversity-related physical risk is generated and transmitted. Existing frameworks largely approach these questions from predominantly economic and financial perspectives, potentially overlooking transmission pathways identified in other disciplines. This study uses Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping to elicit and synthesise expert knowledge from diverse domains to examine the pathways through which biodiversity-related physical risk may affect the real economy, the extent of agreement across expert perspectives, and the characteristics of these pathways. Experts identified a broad range of transmission pathways extending beyond direct biosphere-economy interactions. Cluster analysis revealed distinct expert perspectives, with some groups emphasising biophysical processes and ecosystem-service degradation and others focusing on societal and economic mechanisms. Despite these differences, important commonalities emerged across perspectives. Several of the most frequently identified pathways were mediated through societal processes, including impacts on human health, displacement, conflict, inequality, poverty, and disruption of human activity. The Fuzzy Cognitive Maps also revealed substantial endogeneity. Economic production was both an important driver of biodiversity degradation and an important recipient of its consequences, while reinforcing causal feedback loops linked production, material throughput, social conditions, and biodiversity loss in ways that amplified risk over time. The findings suggest that biodiversity-related physical risk is not adequately characterised as an exogenous shock transmitted from nature to the economy, but as an endogenous process embedded within a broader social-ecological system. By making explicit the societal pathways and feedback mechanisms through which biodiversity degradation and economic activity interact, the study extends existing risk frameworks and highlights the value of incorporating broader interdisciplinary perspectives into risk assessment.

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