Nature Finance: £800m for 14 Ecosystem services (and counting)
In November last year, we launched our Nature Finance Impact Hub, which pinpoints the financial and environmental benefits of nature-positive projects across the globe, addressing the lack of comparable data about the performance of nature-positive projects. The free service allows registered users to gain access to detailed information on funding sources, ecosystem services and financial and environmental impact metrics for nature-positive projects. This is intended to help those operating, benchmarking or evaluating projects, as well supporting the design of future projects. The Hub draws from project data provided to us or that is already held in the public domain, including the latest case studies from the Green Finance Institute Hive.
Over the last six months, our Impact Hub team has been working hard to source and curate information on many more projects with suitable, comparable data. The Hub has now reached an exciting milestone of more than 50 nature positive projects, addressing more than £800 million invested across 14 ecosystem services.
The data collected from these projects have provided us with some notable insights, particularly around the growing presence and availability of innovative finance for nature recovery, which are starting to tackle the current nature finance gap. So far, across the projects in the Hub, the most common funding source is blended finance, followed by private investment, which suggests that nature positive initiatives understand the need for public funding to de-risk initial investment costs. This could be key in addressing the nature finance gap as there is a greater opportunity for reinvestment, providing both socio-environmental and economic gains through sustainable revenue generation. Another insight from the data is that eco-tourism on average raises more revenue than any other ecosystem, estimated at around £75 million, followed by carbon banking at £24.6 million and regenerative agriculture at £18 million. This is highlighted in the dashboard below.
For environmental metrics, a total of 1.375 million hectares of land has been restored so far, consisting mostly of coral reef and peatland environments, as well as 1.655 million hectares of land conserved. The data also shows that on average across all projects the mean revenue generated per project is around £14.5 million. This has been generated through a range of methods, including the sale of sustainable timber, 3 million tonnes of which has been sold so far. In addition to this, 10 million tonnes of CO2 has been captured overall and 77,000,000 tonnes of CO2 saved and/or reduced. More details about how these achievements have been reached can be found in the Hub.
We are also pleased to share that the data submission process has been simplified for those wishing to upload their own projects for potential inclusion on the Hub. Simply fill out the data entry form here which asks for some project details and we will do the rest. By sharing your project data and insights, you are providing inspiration for others and encouraging investment in nature, whilst helping us to improve the quality of data and range of metrics for everyone’s benefit.
To register as a new user with the Impact Hub so that you can explore, filter and summarise impact information on the projects that are most relevant to you, please click here. Existing users can also log in here. We would love to hear what you think of the Hub so far, and whether there are any additional features or insights you would like to see in the future. To let us know what you think, please use the contact form here.