Derbyshire’s Nature Recovery and Natural Capital Investment Aggregator
The primary purpose of Derbyshire’s Nature Recovery and Natural Capital Investment Aggregator will be to facilitate Nature’s Recovery across Derbyshire by making and protecting more space for Nature, forever. Nature and healthy, functioning ecosystems, naturally deliver a huge number of benefits beyond improving conditions for wildlife, with successful habitat restoration projects delivering a vast number of valuable services with real commercial and social values, that are of interest to a range of different stakeholders that are willing to pay to realise them.
Using a strategic and evidence-based approach, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust (DWT) will use rewilding to create and bank new habitat across Derbyshire and finance this through the selling of natural capital services that the habitats deliver. Through this, the project will support all of the 25yr Env. Plan goals, accelerate the delivery of local nature recovery strategies and strengthen the provision of essential ecosystem services across Derbyshire. Our business model will be contingent on delivering the highest quality habitats and ecosystems and will actively reverse the age-old model of exploiting natural capital for economic gain.
The project will establish rewilding as a robust delivery method, whilst also identifying multiple services and buyers for each site, to enable ‘more, bigger, better and joined up’ spaces. The project has the potential for country-wide repeatability and learnings will be shared at this scale. The project will be delivered by DWT in partnership with a range stakeholders, advisors and will develop the processes by which DWT aggregates the sale of ecosystem services to finance the purchase and management of more space for nature. One of the key project partnerships will be with the project’s financial advisor who will help to develop the mechanisms for converting capital investment from the buyers into revenue for the Trust.
Project Aim
To develop a financing model to aggregate multiple potential funding sources to deliver landscape-scale habitat restoration and natural capital provision.
Project partners
Funding model
The project will develop a new funding model to attract private investment to finance the purchase and management of more space for nature. It will establish new processes for aggregating and selling a range of ecosystem services and develop products that that can be marketed and sold to buyers. The project will work to develop a process of identifying multiple services and buyers for each site, a key element of this will also involve undertaking research to understand where services are best delivered to maximise provision.
The project will generate revenue from the selling the uplift in biodiversity habitat units, improvements in water quality (reducing levels of phosphates and nitrates) and carbon that is sequestered in the newly created habitats. The project will also explore opportunities to generate income through the provision of natural flood management measures and the provision of nature rich, accessible open spaces. The income generated through the four pilot sites, will be recycled into the project and used to grow the number of habitat banking sites with the long-term goal of achieving a habitat bank in each of Derbyshire’s local authorities.
DWT will be the primary seller of the environmental benefit. There are a broad range of potential buyers of environmental benefits across Derbyshire and the UK, these include developers, local authorities, utility companies and service providers.
Future Investment Potential
The future investment will play a key role in achieving one of DWT’s core objectives of achieving 30% of Derbyshire manged for wildlife by 2030. The project will also support all of the 25yr Environment Plan goals, but particularly the project will tackle habitat loss and fragmentation through enabling the creation of more space for nature and accelerating the delivery of nature recovery networks. It will allow species to move more freely across the landscape which is essential for their adaptation to climate change. Further, through removing land that is a source of emissions and converting it to a space that absorbs emissions, the project will mitigate climate change and the associated worsening environmental hazards. New habitats will also deliver a range of ecosystem services (e.g. NFM) which will support the adaptation and protection from climate change and associated environmental hazards.
Out of date? Contact us at info@ecosystemsknowledge.net