More clarity from the government is needed on UK compliance and voluntary nature markets over the next 15 to 20 years, to provide sufficient incentives to ensure large-scale restoration while minimising confusion, non-profit Rewilding Britain said in a report published on Wednesday.

Although recent developments in public payments for ecosystems have been welcome, the systems have yet to provide the long-term stability needed to enable rewilding at scale, the organisation said.

“A lot of our rewilding network members … contacted us to say: ‘We want to do something but we’re struggling, how do we access the funding, it’s confusing’,” said Rebecca Wrigley, CEO of Rewilding Britain.

“It’s like a sort of wild west out there with the voluntary credits and compliance markets. The system is fragmented and non-standardised,” Wrigley told Carbon Pulse.

Many landowners have not had the confidence to invest in large-scale restoration initiatives, such as rewilding, she added. “The first step needs to come from government – there needs to be political will for this to give both sides the confidence it’s something worth committing to.”

Different schemes are available across England, Wales, and Scotland. In England, there are three Environmental Land Management (ELM) initiatives. On top of these, payments are available in compliance markets for biodiversity net gain, carbon, and nutrients – while the voluntary biodiversity credit market is also beginning to emerge.

Public funding sources often differ in their eligibility criteria, making it hard for rewilding practitioners to determine suitable options, while relying on additional private finance in uncertain times, Rewilding Britain said in the report.

“It’s clear that the methodologies these schemes use to determine eligibility may conflict with rewilding’s holistic and, in some ways, unique approaches.”

Members of Rewilding’s network are already accessing a diverse mix of public funding sources, a survey of 13 respondents conducted last year found. However, “a lack of clarity on their long-term trajectory, and how they’ll operate, is constraining the ability of land managers to commit to a transition towards rewilding”.

The schemes’ funding criteria needs to support rewilding as a productive land use, rather than being too prescriptive, it said.

A government-backed Rewilding Code certification standard could bring together existing schemes into one approach supporting rewilding, the report suggested.

VOLUNTARY BIODIVERSITY CREDITS

The voluntary biodiversity markets are still in development in the UK. Though many new schemes have emerged over the last couple of years it is still early days for the instruments.

This market is complex and would benefit from clarity through increased regulation, Wrigley said. “It comes back to that kind of holistic and integrated [issue], we’d like to see it simplified. We’d like to see elements of rewilding supported within it like natural regeneration.”

Nattergal, a private nature restoration company run by rewilding and financing experts, is investigating the sale of voluntary credits for biodiversity, carbon, and water.

Long-term, Nattergal would like to see voluntary nature disclosure frameworks become mandatory for the biggest UK companies to spur funding, the report said.

A significant concern with voluntary biodiversity credits comes from the risk of them being used as offsets, rather than purely for nature positive purposes, Wrigley said. Biodiversity credits usually mean the latter, although the meanings are often blurred across standards.

BUNDLING AND STACKING

One way of making payments more integrated across UK nature markets would be through enabling simplified bundling and stacking, as carbon and biodiversity credit payments on their own may not yet provide sufficient income to incentivise conservation, the report said.

Stacking means selling a variety of ecosystem services from the same land under separate transactions, while bundling is selling them together in one package.

England encourages stacking and bundling in its compliance markets, but does not allow it on the voluntary side, unless there is a subsequent quantifiable habitat improvement compared to the baseline situation.

The government should ensure rules for additionality, stacking and bundling accommodate the characteristics of rewilding, the report said.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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