Generating a national snapshot of all publicly-reported investments in ecosystem and species conservation across public, private, and philanthropic finance

Alice Dorothy Stuart, Sophus O.S.E zu Ermgassen

Scaling up investment in ecosystems is a national and international public policy priority, but evaluations of the total amount spent have been severely criticised for a lack of methodological rigour. Increasingly governments are looking to the private sector to fill the nature finance ‘funding gap’, but a lack of transparent reporting of especially private finance flows is a known limitation. In this assessment we provide a country-wide snapshot of investment in ecosystem conservation and restoration in the UK based on publicly available data. We estimate total annual nature finance flows of £1.1bn. Public investment in agri-environment schemes (£389.1m) and grant schemes (£314.8m) were dominant sources, accounting for 54% of identified flows. We demonstrate this public finance is primarily funded through the sale of green bonds and gilts, demonstrating that private finance ultimately plays an important role even in public nature investment. Direct private financial flows (£142.4m) accounted for 13% of all flows, with the two largest flows being corporate philanthropy (£71.5m, inclusive of multi-year commitments), and one major investment by a real asset manager into a UK habitat banking business showing the emerging role of commercial investors in domestic nature markets. However, it is too soon to know if the private investment will yield sufficient financial returns. We find major public transparency gaps in nature finance flows within private organisations claiming to have made large green investments, undermining efforts to understand the both the extent of nature finance flows and their likely impact on nature recovery.