How biodiversity markets shape nature recovery

Biodiversity markets are increasingly being used in conservation policy, but we still don’t fully understand how their design shapes who gets involved and what actually happens for nature on the ground. A new open-access article in Environmental Policy and Governance by Mattia Troiano, a researcher at the ECI, and colleagues looks at this question through England’s Biodiversity Net Gain system, based on interviews and participatory mapping work in Oxfordshire.

Rather than treating these markets as neutral systems, the article shows that design choices matter. They influence who can participate in nature recovery, and how well different efforts connect across landscapes — with clear implications for both inclusion and joined-up conservation, two core pillars of recent English Environmental Policy ambitions.

As environmental market mechanisms continue to expand worldwide, this article in Environmental Policy & Governance brings together work by Mark Hirons (Senior Researcher, ECI), Sophus zu Ermgassen (Researcher, Department of Biology), myself, and a wider team of collaborators across the ECI and The Nature Positive Hub at the Department of Biology, and the Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership to look at how England’s biodiversity market is actually working in practice.

Rather than focusing only on policy design, we were interested in something more grounded: who is actually participating in habitat banking, and what kinds of collaboration are emerging as a result.

What quickly becomes clear is that biodiversity markets don’t just channel money into nature recovery. They also shape the relationships behind it — who works with whom, how land is used, and how decisions get made across landscapes.

One of the key insights is that there isn’t a single “model” of how this happens. Instead, different types of organisations have developed quite different ways of delivering habitat banking, and these differences matter.

Some approaches are built around scale and investment. These tend to make it easier for landowners to take part, including those without experience in nature markets and private conservation finance, because the financial and technical expertise sits with the provider. But collaboration in these cases often stays fairly narrow, focused on getting projects delivered efficiently as part of the commercial and for-profit organisational nature of these provides, rather than building wider landscape coordination. One landowner stressing the risk adversity and financial benefit they found in leasing their land to a market provider in this category highlighted that:

Other approaches are much more rooted in place. These are more closely connected to conservation networks and local nature recovery planning, and they tend to support stronger collaboration across organisations and landscapes. The trade-off is that participation is more limited, often relying on existing relationships or own access to suitable land, financial capital, and institutional support, typical of conservation organisations.

There is also a middle ground, where individual landowners are directly involved but supported by not-for-profit organisations that help design projects, navigate regulation, and connect them into wider conservation plans. These organisations effectively act as facilitators between landowners, policy, and ecological priorities, while also helping reduce risk and complexity for participants. One landowner in this category highlighting the collaborative, rather than competitive, approach fostered around their habitat banking project remarked that:

Across all of this, a consistent pattern emerges. The more a model is designed for scale and ease of participation, the more it can fragment collaboration. And the more it supports deep collaboration, the more it tends to depend on existing networks and capacity.

So rather than thinking about biodiversity markets as neutral delivery tools, it becomes more useful to see them as systems that actively shape how nature recovery is organised — not just funded.