Holistic Investment Data-Points

A UK-wide organisation, the NFCA has been founded by nature finance experts collaborating to support landowners, project developers, corporates and investors interested in blended financing arrangements for UK nature restoration activity.

While the UK Nature Market is in its infancy it is critical for potential buyers and investors of nature-based solutions to be able to cut-through the complex world of ‘natural capital markets’ and have greater confidence to invest time towards the goal of restoring UK nature.

The hope is that this will accelerate the growth of a high-integrity UK voluntary carbon and biodiversity credits market, while delivering social, health and economic impacts in the process. 

The organisation is delivering on a number of workstreams, linked to work by UK government agencies and the British Standards Institute. Together, the idea is to develop a high integrity nature market framework and supportive regulatory environment for natural capital transactions in the UK.

These workstreams benefit from the crowdsourcing of a highly advanced, multi-disciplinary team of individuals, who sit behind the organisational membership structure of the NFCA.

This workstream is developing a practical, set of universal investment data-points for natural capital projects, to assist investors and corporates to assess the fit of a project with their investment and nature positive goals.

The workstream has already yielded two key helpful outputs:

• A validated set of four 'investment pillars', that can be used to structure a 'balanced scorecard' approach to evaluating and managing the performance of Natural Capital projects. These are 'indivisible' dimensions that NFCA believe all projects should be assessed against.
• A validated set of 7 questions for projects, at all stages of development, can answer - leading to a helpful, objective, case-study format to help everyone better understand 'what good looks like'.

This workstream is being led by members Iconic Blockchain, Kana and Rhizocore Technologies.

It has been informed by a series of collaborative workshops, including a series of Natural Capital Investment Fund workshops hosted by Kana in December 2023.