Background

Opportunities have been identified on the supply side for nature recovery projects that could be funded by an ecosystem service market, specifically around land management practices. Groups of farmers are interested in adopting nature-friendly methods on their land. We're now working to clarify the following:

1. Who would be willing to pay for nature-based services?
2. What exactly those services would look like for customers.
3. How these services could be delivered and paid for in practice.

These challenges are not unusual. Ecosystem service markets are still developing and can be confusing. While there's a lot of focus on specific markets like carbon and biodiversity net gain (BNG), less has been done to explore the full range of opportunities that could come from a varied landscape. While there has been attention on attracting investment for new ecosystem service models, there’s been less focus on how to find and attract the paying customers that these models will ultimately need.

What we're doing

With grant funding from Innovate UK, we are working to understand the market opportunities that exist within Oxfordshire for bringing buyers and sellers of ecosystem services together, through a high-integrity local nature market framework.

As part of this work, our partners 3Keel are undertaking a mapping exercise to identify businesses and organisations with a high dependence on or operational risk exposure to Oxfordshire. Based on this, they aim to see if there is a potential opportunity for landowners to take actions on their land that could help reduce or eliminate these risks. For example, this could include measures to reduce flood risk, and there are already some cases in the county where infrastructure organisations are exploring these types of transaction.

The goal is to identify the right market framework and the steps needed to make these opportunities possible.