Open call for evidence

Expanding the role of the private sector in nature recovery: call for evidence

Updated 13 June 2025

Applies to England

Ministerial foreword

This government’s ambitious Plan for Change is clear that our number one mission is to drive economic growth.

Nature and the services it provides are at the heart of our economic prosperity and national security. From clean water and fertile soils to pollination and climate regulation, our economy depends on the natural environment. Businesses across the UK, whether in food and agriculture, construction, finance, or retail, rely on a healthy natural environment to operate, grow and innovate. The decline of nature poses a material risk to our shared prosperity.

The economic and business benefits of nature’s recovery cannot be secured through public funding alone. We need a whole economy approach, with business, policy, targets and taxpayers’ money all pulling in the same direction. There are significant opportunities for businesses investing in nature recovery: for growth, development and diversification, innovation, resilience, productivity and cost savings.

The international economic context makes tackling the decline of nature more challenging, but no less important. Government is focused on securing best value for every pound of taxpayers’ money to meet our dual objectives of growing the economy and protecting the environment. We want to enable the private sector to play a vital role in restoring our natural capital to secure long-term, resilient growth within existing sectors, as well as creating new jobs and growth in the burgeoning nature services sector.

That is why Government is launching this call for evidence to better understand how we can support and incentivise business to invest in nature recovery. We are especially interested in how to enable those economic sectors which impact or depend upon nature the most to invest in reducing the environmental harms of their operations while growing our shared natural capital. We want to hear from businesses, investors, and innovators on how we can, together, protect the natural foundations of our economy – and in doing so, secure sustained and resilient growth nationwide.

Introduction

Over half of global GDP is highly or moderately dependent upon nature and the services it provides, powering our industries, safeguarding our food security and protecting public health.^{[footnote 1]} The Office for National Statistics has valued the stock of natural capital in England (excluding oil and gas) at £1.4 trillion, and the annual benefits of service flows from those assets at over £35 billion, larger than any single manufacturing sector.^{[footnote 2]}

It follows that the decline of nature in the UK to historically and internationally low levels, in addition to global nature decline, creates risks to the UK economy and UK companies which are already being realised. According to the Green Finance Institute’s analysis, nature-related risks could cause losses to UK GDP of £150 to £300 billion by 2030.^{[footnote 3]} Impacts to GDP will be caused by reduced productivity, fragmented supply chains, business disruption and increased costs of insurance, among other factors. Conversely, nature recovery offers opportunities for growth, business development and diversification, innovation, and cost savings.

To respond to this call for evidence, send written submissions to Nature.Investment.CfE@defra.gov.uk by 11:59pm on 7 August 2025.

Purpose of the call for evidence

This call for evidence will support the further development of policies to increase private sector investment in protecting and improving nature. This means it is focused on the “demand side”: on increasing the incentives for private sector actors to invest in nature in line with the benefits they draw from the natural environment and the impacts they have on it. This includes funding changes in land management or use, which we asked about in question 9 of the recent land use consultation.

This aligns with action the Government is taking to support the development of Nature-Positive Pathways for the UK economy. These will lay out the specific changes needed within business sectors to align with the UK’s nature-related targets. They will define the expected contribution of each sector to the delivery of the nature targets in the revised Environmental Improvement Plan, which will be published later this year.

Government is also further developing the framework around the “supply side” of nature recovery, which is an essential enabler of investment. This includes establishing nature investment standards and consulting on steps needed to strengthen high-integrity voluntary carbon and nature markets.

This call for evidence seeks views from businesses, investors, nature service providers (such as farmers and land managers) and the public on how government can work with business sectors operating in England to:

• use the most effective policy measures to increase business investment in protecting and improving the natural environment in England
• secure the economic benefits of a healthy natural environment and business innovation in environmental protection and improvement
• identify and manage any risks for businesses, communities or consumers arising from increased business investment in the natural environment

This is not a consultation and does not represent any firm decisions by government. Rather, it is the next step in an ongoing conversation.

This call for evidence is in two sections:

1. The first section sets out the key role of the environment in the government’s economic growth mission and the economic case for business investment in the natural environment. Views are sought on the cross-cutting principles and opportunities that could govern policy development to grow this investment.
2. The second section seeks views on increasing investment in specific environmental outcomes: clean and plentiful water; nature-based carbon reductions; access to nature; flood management; and sustainable land use and food production.

Section 1: Policy principles

Environmental improvement is key to economic growth

The Government’s Plan for Change targets the sustained economic growth that is essential to securing higher living standards, good jobs, and greater productivity in every part of the UK. This is the number one mission of this Government.

Economic growth and thriving nature are not conflicting objectives. In the past, some instances of well-intentioned but ineffective regulation have placed disproportionate burdens on business without delivering for the natural environment. We recognise the need for essential environmental protection rules to be pragmatic, efficient, and effective in enabling strategic nature protection and restoration on a larger scale. Our bold reforms in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill show that we are taking action. The new Nature Restoration Fund will deliver a win-win for planning and the environment by making it simpler for developers to discharge their environmental obligations while making it possible to carry out nature restoration in the most effective ways and places.

This Government is also committed to the ambitious targets to restore nature which have been set under the Environment Act 2021: halting and reversing the decline in species populations, reducing the risk of national species extinction, creating and restoring at least 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat, restoring water bodies to their natural state, and increasing tree and woodland cover to 16.5% of total land area in England. Internationally, we are also committed to protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030 (30by30).

Meeting these targets need not come at the expense of growth, because as we have heard throughout engagement for the land use consultation, a healthy and biodiverse natural environment is critical to sustained and resilient economic development. It is also in businesses’ interests to take action and harness the long-term growth and cost saving opportunities that derive from a secure supply of nature services. This can help ensure resilient business models and supply chains.

Conversely, if we do not act, we will increasingly see real-world economic harm and business losses incurred due to nature degradation. Bloomberg recently set out 10 case studies describing how companies have suffered material economic losses due to poorly managed impacts and dependencies on nature.^{[footnote 4]} Five of the top ten risks for the decade ahead relate to the climate and environment, according to the World Economic Forum.^{[footnote 5]}

These are not just international risks, they are here in the UK too. A report by the Green Finance Institute last year estimated that environmental degradation could lead to a reduction in UK GDP of 1.5% to 3% by 2030. In certain scenarios, nature-related risks including water shortages and soil health reduction could lead to a 6% reduction in GDP.^{[footnote 6]} The most exposed sectors in the UK are agriculture, forestry and fishing; manufacturing; construction; mining and quarrying; and transport and storage.^{[footnote 7]}

Business investment is key to environmental improvement

There will always be a role for public investment in public goods, including in environmental protection and enhancement. However, to restore and grow our natural environment and the services it provides, we need the whole economy to value nature more accurately and take a share of this responsibility. Not only does this ensure that finite public money can be spent where it is most needed, it can also better harness the innovation and efficiency of the private sector in addressing environmental impacts for which they are responsible, at the lowest cost.

We are already supporting business investment to pull in the same direction as our targets, in some cases through well-established, direct policy incentives such as the Landfill Tax and the plastic bag charge. These policies help to ensure that businesses reduce their environmental impacts and that a greater share of costs is picked up by those who cause the damage, rather than being paid for entirely from the public purse.

Voluntary action by individual businesses, including engaging with voluntary nature markets such as the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code, is welcome but not sufficient: the annual market value of these voluntary markets, based on sales of units, is estimated to be around £5 million.

Despite the good progress which has been made, we still need to go further in enabling economic sectors which impact or depend upon nature and the services nature provides to invest in reducing the environmental harms of their operations and growing our shared natural capital.

Policy approach

We want to test 4 objectives in line with which we could further shape policy design in this area, incentivising the private sector to align with our targets under the Environment Act.

Objective 1: Economic growth

Everything we do must support sustained and resilient economic growth. This may apply to the:

• business sectors themselves, through greater business resilience, productivity gain, resource-use efficiency, cost avoidance, and revenue diversification
• whole economy, through the cross-cutting benefits it draws from a healthy natural environment and natural resources
• emergence and expansion of new industries and services in the green economy, including a growing market for nature services where the UK has the opportunity to take the lead

Objective 2: Business certainty

Businesses require long-term certainty on the rules which will govern their sectors and a level playing field to invest at greater scale. As set out in the land use consultation, policy decisions about the natural environment must also take a long-term view of changing land suitability and prioritising resilience. Government will provide clear, long-term policy and regulatory incentives to support a cost-effective, equitable transition to a nature positive economy. We are working closely with businesses to progress this work through the revised Environmental Improvement Plan, and by supporting the development of sectoral Nature Positive Pathways.

Objective 3: Innovation

New policy should not be overly prescriptive, administratively burdensome, or inflexible in adapting to change. As set out in the Corry Review, environmental regulation should make sure we protect and enhance nature, but it cannot do that by rigidly preventing any change. We must harness the strength of the private sector in innovation, problem solving and securing outcomes.

Objective 4: Fair and proportionate burden sharing

We are considering several approaches to determining which sectors could and should invest more in order to find the fairest and most efficient solutions for both businesses and the taxpayer. These include:

1. Proportionate application of the prevention, rectification at source, and polluter pays principles in line with the Environmental principles policy statement. This may apply especially to reducing environmental harms.
2. Proportionate application of the beneficiary pays principle: ensuring that those who benefit from environmental goods and services, including the information that nature provides, contribute to maintaining and improving their condition. This may apply especially to achieving environmental improvement and conservation of nature. This is a well-established policy approach to addressing economic externalities. Examples of this approach used in environmental policy include water abstraction charges, partnership funding contributions to flood defence schemes, and support for businesses to effectively share benefits accrued in the development of new products using genetic information.
3. Fair burden sharing. Ensuring that those sectors who not only should but also could pay for restoring nature are encouraged to do so: that is, incentivising the sectors with greater market power and capacity to invest in nature.

Questions

Q1. Do you agree with the 4 intended objectives for policy to increase investment in nature set out above?

• Do you agree with each of the 4 objectives?
• Any further comments including other factors the government should consider?

Q2. Is there evidence from existing domestic or international policies which the government can learn from regarding:

• the benefits of policy action to increase private sector investment in nature?
• the policy actions that are most effective and efficient at increasing private sector investment in nature?
• the risks of policy action to increase private sector investment in nature?

Section 2: Outcome- and sector-specific examples and questions

Outcome 1: Clean and plentiful water – cleaning up rivers, lakes and seas

Clean and plentiful water is essential to our economy, biodiversity, health and wellbeing. Effective water management safeguards biodiversity by maintaining habitats and ecological balance, preserving wetlands, groundwater, rivers, and lakes for the future.

Many industries are heavily reliant on a sustainable water supply, including agriculture, food production, hospitality, power generation and data centres. Parts of England are already facing water shortages, and the national deficit is expected to reach nearly 5 billion litres of water a day by 2050.^{[footnote 8]} Constraints in water supply will impact businesses, consumers and the economy as a whole, including by impeding housing development and energy production.

Pressures on the water system are increasing due to climate change and population growth. We need a more resilient water system to support and sustain economic growth. The water industry is increasing its investment into nature with a commitment to invest over £20 billion in enhancement measures to protect and improve the environment between 2025 and 2030. £3 billion of this investment will be used to deliver green and nature-based solutions.

However, we know that we need transformative change of the water system to reach our ambitions. In October 2024 the Secretary of State announced the launch of an independent commission to review the water sector. The terms of reference for this commission set out that it will consider how to enable greater use of nature-based solutions in the context of strategic planning for water, where these represent good value for money. The commission’s recommendations are likely to form the basis of further legislation to boost the investment potential of the sector and contribute to economic growth, speed up delivery on infrastructure to support house building, clean up our waterways, and tackle water scarcity.

The Land Use Framework will form a toolkit to support decision making and inform discussion on how we can reach our targets on nature and climate while delivering multiple benefits and supporting economic growth, providing further certainty about investment in water.

Investment from the water industry alone will not achieve our ambitions for a healthy, resilient water system. We need to bring in private investment from a wider range of sources to tackle the full and wide range of pressures on water, including agricultural run-off, pollution from roads and urban environments, and the impacts of historic modifications to our rivers such as abandoned weirs.

Just as water is essential to economic activity in the UK, good-quality water management has a diversity of beneficiaries: developers, farmers and land managers, food and drinks producers, energy production, and tourism and water sports. Improving natural ecosystem function can improve resilience to flood and drought. We all depend on the water system and benefit from its restoration. We are keen to understand how we can enable these many beneficiaries to invest in nature-positive water management methods, directly and indirectly, especially at a catchment level.

The management of land to support our water needs is fundamental to guaranteeing both the quality and quantity of our water supply. Broadening our approaches to include nature-based solutions and natural flood management offers opportunities to better manage our landscape to address pollution, flood risk and climate impacts, ensuring the best value for money for bill payers. It also affords opportunities to deliver a range of social and economic gains.

The independent water commission will report to government in the summer. The commission’s recommendations, combined with the responses to this call for evidence focused on investment in nature, will support our future reforms to the water system.

Questions

Q3. Which sectors could and should contribute as part of a catchment-based approach to water management for nature recovery?

Q4. What are the barriers to incentivising sectors that depend on the water system to invest in water outcomes? What actions are needed by government to address these barriers?

Q5. What activities by water companies that support nature recovery have potential to attract additional private-sector investment?

Q6. What should our priorities be when assessing the benefits of environmental enhancement measures proposed by the water sector?

Q7. How can the water sector ensure that opportunities to deliver multiple benefits are considered from the start of investment planning and decision-making?

Outcome 2: Nature-based carbon reductions and removals

Carbon sequestration, storage and emissions avoidance through nature-based solutions, such as woodland creation and peatland restoration, can provide direct and cost-effective carbon savings that contribute to meeting our net zero targets. These nature-based approaches will play an essential role in counterbalancing residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors.

Between 1990 and 2022, forests in the UK are estimated to have removed 537 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, equivalent to 3.1% of total emissions during that period.^{[footnote 9]} Peatlands are the UK’s largest terrestrial carbon store when in good condition, but in their current degraded condition they represent a net source of emissions instead.^{[footnote 10]} In the uplands, the mean emissions factor of degraded peat is 3.2 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year.

Businesses with supply chains in the forestry, land use and agricultural sectors can fund and report emissions sequestration or avoidance in their own value chains through insetting agreements, which can include the full range of nature-based solutions and outcomes.

As well as storing and sequestering carbon, woodland creation and peatland restoration can provide habitats to support biodiversity, enhance water quality, reduce flood risk, and improve soil health. These approaches bolster resilience to climate change and strengthen ecosystems’ ability to adapt to changing conditions. Planting trees on farms, such as in agroforestry systems, also provides multiple benefits which can improve the resilience of farm businesses: improved soil health, water quality, flood mitigation and shelter for animals and crops. In other settings, trees provide natural shade to homes, schools, hospitals, and transport infrastructure – reducing the risks of people or machinery overheating – as well as increasing local property values and residents’ wellbeing. The Forestry Commission reports that trees can reduce urban heat by 2ºC to 8ºC through shade and air movement.^{[footnote 11]} In 2023 the heat regulation benefits of urban trees were valued at £538 million by the Office of National Statistics.^{[footnote 12]}

Woodland creation as a nature-based carbon removal can go hand in hand with more traditional income streams, such as commercial forestry. Planting new woodlands for timber and other wood products supports the decarbonisation of the built environment and construction industry and contributes to local economies: core forestry and wood processing supports 33,000 jobs, based on 2021 data. Using timber as a construction material can reduce embodied emissions in a single building by 20% to 60%.^{[footnote 13]} At an individual building level, carbon storage is approximately 50% higher in timber-framed homes, and 400% higher for larger building using engineered timber products.

High-integrity markets for nature-based carbon are in place in the UK, primarily the Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Code. These markets are currently fully voluntary. Although they are steadily growing, they are unlikely to reach a significant scale without additional incentives for businesses to buy them.

Government has recently consulted on whether to include the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and is currently considering responses. Inclusion in the ETS may significantly increase demand for WCC units.

We are supporting the development of codes and standards for a wider range of habitats that can sequester carbon and provide other ecosystem services. We are supporting innovation in this space through our Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund and working with the British Standards Institution on the Nature Investment Standards Programme to provide certainty on what these new markets need to do to ensure high integrity.

Questions

Q8. What are the reasons why businesses fund or buy nature-based carbon through insetting agreements or markets such as the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code?

Q9. What are the barriers for businesses in buying nature-based carbon through markets such as the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code?

Q10. How can government ensure policies to support tree planting are also effective in unlocking private finance for woodland carbon?

Q11. Which sectors could be further incentivised to use, reuse and recycle timber as a low-carbon material?

Q12. How could businesses which emit greenhouse gases or have negative impacts on biodiversity be further incentivised to fund or buy nature-based carbon reductions and removals, in line with the polluter pays principle?

Outcome 3: Access to nature – supporting tourism, recreation and wellbeing

Protected Landscapes provide important benefits in supporting internationally important habitats, wildlife, and heritage and provide access to beautiful green and blue spaces to almost 270 million visitors a year. Although they cover just one quarter of England, they contain half of our priority habitats and sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) and will provide the backbone to achieving 30by30 on land in England (protecting 30% of land for nature by 2030).

Nature recovery in Protected Landscapes is therefore key to securing resilient, long-term growth.

Protected Landscapes are also living landscapes where businesses thrive. We want to support businesses to do this in a way that is regenerative for nature, climate and communities. Protected Landscapes organisations are particularly well placed for integrated and place-based delivery, breaking down silos to recover nature in a way which protects communities from flooding, fights climate change and grows the rural economy. However, they need to be sustainably resourced to do this.

We are seeking views on ways to bring in greater, and more diverse, sources of funding into our Protected Landscapes to ensure that these national assets achieve their full potential – becoming greener, wider and more accessible. We want to ensure no-one lives more than a 15-minute walk from a green or blue space.

Access to green space supports physical and mental health, and is therefore vital to productivity, labour market participation, and reducing demand on our NHS. Urban green spaces currently support 2.1 million people to meet weekly physical activity guidelines, which was estimated in 2017 to avoid approximately £1.4 billion of health service costs just in London.^{[footnote 14]} Natural England has estimated that £2.1 billion per year in health costs could be saved if everyone had good access to green space.^{[footnote 15]}

However, access to the outdoors is not equitable, with those from ethnic minority or lower socio-economic backgrounds particularly likely to have poor access to nature close to home. There are also physical and social barriers to accessing nature, such as lack of facilities, unsuitable paths, or a lack of information about what to expect.

Questions

Q13. What measures could be used to increase and diversify funding to ensure our Protected Landscapes are sustainably resourced?

Q14. Would you support greater application of the beneficiary pays principle in Protected Landscapes?

Q15. Would you support greater application of the polluter pays principle in Protected Landscapes?

Q16. What are the benefits, and barriers, to businesses investing in actions which help to contribute to 30by30?

Q17. In order to support access to green spaces in more urban settings, what measures could be used to increase and diversify funding for local parks and natural spaces?

Outcome 4: Flood management

Land which is enabled to function naturally can play a central role in protecting against flooding, which is happening with increased frequency and severity. Flooding is currently the UK’s most costly natural hazard, with damages and the associated investment in flood risk reduction costing the UK around £2.2 billion annually. Natural flood management interventions upstream of populated centres can reduce flood risk to those areas, as can restoring habitats and natural processes within the urban environment itself. A recent report commissioned by RSA Insurance and the Wildlife Trusts projected that the costs of flood risk for business will increase by 27% by 2050, resulting from damage to sites, business interruption and lost production time.^{[footnote 16]} The same report found that natural flood management projects could deliver up to £10 of benefits for every £1 invested over 30 years.

Flood management provides clear benefits to businesses, households and utility providers in affected areas by reducing the risk of flood events and, consequently, costs for insurance policy holders. Economies at no risk of flooding, or where risk has been lowered, enjoy higher levels of growth and recover more quickly from shocks – increasing investor confidence, viability of businesses, resilience of critical infrastructure, innovation, and tourism.

Natural flood management can also play a role in managing the increasing flood risk to transport infrastructure – 37% of all railways and 38% of all roads are in areas at risk of flooding, increasing to 54% and 46%, respectively, by the middle of the century.^{[footnote 17]} An example of this can be found in Devon, where Network Rail are supporting the Connecting the Culm scheme to explore the use of nature-based solutions to reduce the risk of flooding to the Great Western Main Railway line and build long-term resilience.

Natural flood management can offer many additional benefits, including improving water quality, reducing storm overflows, reducing soil erosion, increasing carbon capture and storage, and creating new habitat to support biodiversity.

Although some trailblazer natural flood management projects have emerged, including the Wyre Valley project, the potential local benefits of natural flood management methods are not yet being widely harnessed to fund flood management. This consultation seeks views on how this funding could be enabled.

Please also note an open call for evidence on alternative sources of funding, which asks for views on Defra’s planned work to increase private investment in Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management in general.

Questions

Q18. Which of the beneficiary sectors of natural flood management are best placed to contribute to funding it?

Q19. What mechanisms could best enable this?

Q20. How can mechanisms such as these account for and adapt to the local nature of natural flood management?

Outcome 5: Sustainable land use and food production

The food and drink industry and the agriculture which underpins it are foundational to our food security and economic resilience. These sectors are also heavily and directly reliant on the natural environment. Healthy soils, pollinator populations, water supply, pest management, healthy fish stocks, and more are essential to food production, as well as the production of timber and biomass. Pollination services in the UK increase productivity by approximately £630 million a year, and research suggests pollinator species in Britain have declined by an average of 25% since 1980.^{[footnote 18]}

Increases in agricultural productivity have enabled the UK’s population to grow from the same amount of land. But agricultural intensification and land use change have been the biggest driver of biodiversity loss terrestrially, and overfishing is the lead driver of marine biodiversity loss. Soil degradation was calculated in 2010 to cost £1.2 billion every year.^{[footnote 19]} Agricultural production is also a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The sector is essential to delivering our targets for climate and nature, alongside its core role in ensuring our food security, through emissions reductions and sequestration, and in realising the huge co-benefits of nature-based solutions such as improving biodiversity and water quality. Agricultural emissions in the UK have reduced by 12% since 1990 (as of 2022), with many farms using more efficient agricultural practices. The entire agri-food sector has a role to play in creating a thriving, resilient farming sector that can help grow the rural economy, provide healthy, affordable food, and lead the fight to reverse the decline in biodiversity in our countryside.

Many food and drink businesses already recognise the resilience, productivity and efficiency benefits of investing in nature and carbon reductions and removals in their own supply chains, or using voluntary offset markets, as part of their organisational strategies. However, without a regulatory requirement to do so, there may be a first mover disadvantage or challenges to build the internal business case for investing in nature.

The land use consultation set out Government’s assessment of the change that is needed to restore nature, address climate change, support development, and maintain food production in the long term. Feedback through consultation workshops highlighted that many land managers were willing to deliver more for nature or climate change mitigation, but needed economic incentives to align with this vision to deliver it.

This call for evidence seeks to understand where there are opportunities to introduce such incentives, placing greater responsibility on processors and retailers, who are price setters for primary produce from farms and fisheries, to improve the overall environmental performance of their supply chains. Farmers must be enabled to invest in long-term sustainable practices, and we must ensure that they get their fair share of the benefits for the services they help nature to provide.

Questions

Q21. What policies or financial models have been most successful in improving environmental performance and sustainability within the food and drink sector? Please provide evidence.

Q22. What further measures would be most effective in incentivising the food and drink sector to reduce its impact on nature and increase its investment in nature recovery?

Q23. How can measures best be designed to ensure fair distribution of costs and accountability across the food and drink supply chain, and to avoid putting domestic farmers at a disadvantage?

Q24. How can measures recognise and mitigate the impacts of the wider bioeconomy on land (for example, the use of natural fibres, timber, paper and pulp)? Which sectors are most important?

Q25. What measures could be used to increase investment in sustainable timber production and processing, and timber reuse and recycling?

Outcome 6: International nature finance and access and benefit sharing

Our interactions with nature do not stop at our borders. Many UK businesses rely on global supply chains that depend upon healthy soils, clean water, and pollination – ecosystem services increasingly under threat. Around half of UK’s nature-related risk originates overseas, embedded in supply chains and financial exposures. An estimated £3.8 trillion in UK financial assets are underpinned by global natural capital, much of which is highly dependent on ecosystems that are rapidly deteriorating.^{[footnote 20]} We need nature to thrive everywhere to secure sustained growth and prosperity in the UK and worldwide.

The UK is committed to meeting the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), adopted by all Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Target 19(c) underscores the importance of mobilising private finance to halt and reverse nature loss. Other key targets – Target 14 (mainstreaming biodiversity in decision-making), Target 15 (nature-related business disclosures), and Target 18 (reform harmful subsidies and scaling up positive incentives) – are central to this call for evidence.

The private sector is already active on climate change, and where possible climate and nature finance synergies should be optimised. Understanding and addressing nature impacts at source is critical to building resilience and long-term value, and UK business should be supported to embed nature recovery across corporate strategies and financial decision-making where materially relevant to their operations and long-term profitability. International nature markets are nascent but are showing promise as a tool to drive private sector investment in nature.

The UK is supporting schemes such as the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits to help promote high integrity in international markets, and domestic expertise can also be leveraged to help inform market design in other jurisdictions. Lessons from carbon markets can also inform the design of emerging nature markets. High integrity markets are vital to delivering real outcomes for people and the planet. Poor governance, weak verification, and opaque reporting can undermine trust and lead to further nature degradation.

The UK is also backing the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), a global, market-led initiative that provides a voluntary framework for assessing and reporting nature-related risks. The TNFD enables businesses and financial institutions to integrate nature into strategic planning and risk management, supporting a shift toward a nature-positive economy.

The UK is demonstrating international leadership to support fair and equitable benefit-sharing from the use of digital genetic resources, including through voluntary contributions to the Cali Fund. This complements broader efforts to scale up global finance for nature, including through partnerships with countries like Brazil.

Questions

Q26. Are you aware of your international nature-related risks, dependencies and impacts, for example, through using frameworks such as the TNFD? If so, how do you manage and address them?

Q27. What role is global nature playing in your investment strategy? For example, are you exploring investing in international ecosystem services, including biodiversity credit markets, or avoiding certain types of investments due to their impacts on nature? What would help you better integrate nature into investment decisions?

Q28. How can the UK help ensure that biodiversity co-benefits are integrated into international carbon markets, and vice-versa? How has your experience with carbon markets influenced your approach to nature markets?

Q29. Does the concept of access and benefit sharing apply to your organisation or sector? If so, how do you incorporate benefit-sharing into your business model?

Q30. What are the key challenges to investing in nature-based opportunities in biodiversity-rich countries? What can policy makers and market enablers do to help scale international nature investment and better connect supply with demand?

1. ‘Managing nature risks: From understanding to action’, PWC and World Economic Forum, 2023 ↩

2. Office for National Statistics, UK Natural Capital Reports Accounts, 2024 ↩

3. Assessing the Materiality of Nature-Related Financial Risks for the UK, Green Finance Institute, 2024 ↩

4. When the Bee Stings, BloombergNEF, 2023 ↩

5. 2025 Global Risks Report, World Economic Forum ↩

6. ‘Assessing the Materiality of Nature-Related Financial Risks for the UK’, Green Finance Institute, 2024 ↩

7. ‘Assessing the Materiality of Nature-Related Financial Risks for the UK’, Green Finance Institute, 2024 ↩

8. Summary of England’s revised draft regional and water resources management plans, Environment Agency, 2024 ↩

9. ‘Removal of greenhouse gases by UK forests’, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, 2024 ↩

10. Peatland factsheet, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Accessed April 2025 ↩

11. Air temperature regulation by urban trees and green infrastructure, Forestry Commission, 2013 ↩

12. Woodland natural capital accounts, Office for National Statistics ↩

13. Timber in Construction Roadmap, Defra, 2025 ↩

14. Natural Capital Accounts for Public Green Space in London, 2017 ↩

15. Report on the Walking the Way to Health Initiative, Natural England, 2009 ↩

16. Assessing the Multiple Benefits of Natural Flood Management, The Wildlife Trusts, 2025 ↩

17. National assessment of flood and coastal erosion risk in England 2024 ↩

18. ‘Pollinator monitoring more than pays for itself’, Breeze et al., Journal of Applied Ecology, 2023 ↩

19. Graves, A. and others (2011). The total costs of soils degradation in England and Wales. Research project by Cranfield University. Final Report to Defra. Project SP1606. ↩

20. ‘Assessing the Materiality of Nature-Related Financial Risks for the UK’, Green Finance Institute, 2024 ↩