Ever wondered where nature finance in the UK comes from?

In my last 10 yrs in biodiversity finance I’ve seen tens of reports that say stuff about the total amount of finance flowing into nature or speculate on the total funding gap or funding needs. I’ve often found it a bit mind-blowing that people can say that stuff with confidence because the nature finance I know is horribly untransparent. Stuff people say in public is often unverifiable and also there’s no consensus about what nature finance actually means. Do a water company’s green bonds for improving water treatment infrastructure count? Do public stocks with a good ESG score count? A lot of people include stuff that’s not within a definition that a nature conservationist would recognise.

So Dr Alice Stuart (supported by me, The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Circular Bioeconomy Alliance) thought we’d give it a go – to trawl through the public information to assess what verifiable nature finance into species and ecosystem conservation is flowing in a given region (UK). Our new paper in Ambio: “Generating a national snapshot of all publicly reported investments in ecosystem and species conservation across public, private, and philanthropic finance“, tracking all the investment that we could find in the public domain in the UK from around 2023/2024.

My takeaways: – we estimated £1.15 billion/year of publicly-reported nature investment.

• We can’t trust a lot of stuff people say about the amount of nature finance flowing into nature because data availability is super sketchy. Superficial assessments just aren’t going to be trustworthy.
• Alice found that as of 2024 the dominant nature finance was public subsidies, grants programmes, and corporate philanthropy. It’s interesting that at the time, even though there were multiple nature markets working in England, corporate philanthropy still dwarfed these. I expect the picture has changed a little bit as BNG investment has risen since then but it shows that philanthropy is still totally comparable with nature markets. Our paper also provides a really useful baseline for somebody to repeat in a couple of years’ time to see how the overall picture has changed, including changes in private investment.
• There’s no information at all in public about some really important aspects of nature investment, such as the operational investment of large land managers, which we know is critical.
• Double counting is an issue. eg When a financial institution makes an investment in BNG units what counts: the investment or the fundamental sale of those units, given that a big chunk of that investment is paying investors back and not delivering nature recovery?
• Ultimately what Alice and I are particularly interested in is not the amount of finance flowing but the actual outcomes it delivers. Feels like we’re still miles away from getting to that point.