Financing UK ecosystem services

Exploring the different ecosystem markets in the UK that deliver public goods

This project will produce a co-authored report between iCASP and Resilient Dairy Landscapes exploring a sample of the public-private partnerships that exist for the financing of ecosystem services in the UK.

An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscapes, work together to form a bubble of life.

Many schemes are in the theoretical stages of development or in the early stages of developing trades, for example, Non Indigenous Species (NIS) and Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENs). However, in the UK there are a growing number of public-private partnerships increasing the scale and scope of the ecosystem services market. Environmental restoration and conservation challenges go beyond what can be financed publicly and there are significant opportunities for private investment in the delivery of public goods.

This report explores the voluntary ecosystem services market in the UK, identifying key players involved in payment for ecosystem services schemes, trading platforms and supporting modelling tools. The project will explore the voluntary ecosystem services market in the UK by understanding UK payment for ecosystem services schemes and the role of trading platforms and modellers, and developing an understanding of how these players operate while identifying possible synergies, examples of good practice and challenges to implementation. It will focus specifically on understanding the social distribution of ecosystem services, how values are attributed to ecosystem services and legal obligations or challenges surrounding the implementation of the schemes. An online review of the UK's ecosystem services market will be carried out by iCASP to identify UK public-private schemes and partnerships, as well as platforms and modellers that facilitate the delivery of, and act as a driver of, the UK's voluntary ecosystem services market. In-depth interviews will be conducted with four ecosystem services schemes (the Woodland Carbon Code, the Peatland Code, Landscape Enterprise Networks and the Natural), trading platform EnTrade and biophysical modellers, Viridian Logic.

Outputs

Exploring the different ecosystem markets in the UK that deliver public goods

Main report

    Executive summary

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