Why corporate nature investment needs carbon and collaboration to scale
This article originally featured on Business Green, the UK's leading web site for green business news and analysis.
At Boothby Wildland in Lincolnshire, we've created a 'buyers club' enabling corporate investors to reap returns and support nature restoration over 50 years, writes Nature Broking CEO Luke Baldwin.
Nature operates on a different timetable from business. Companies budget annually, report quarterly and regularly rewrite their three or five-year strategies. Restoring a landscape, however can take decades. Rivers, soils and species are largely indifferent to the corporate planning cycle.
So perhaps the most unusual thing happening at a former arable farm in Lincolnshire is not that a family of four Eurasian beavers have recently been released into its river - it is that eight companies have agreed to keep funding the land around them for the next 50 years.
Those companies come from QBE's insurance supply chain and include insurers, law firms, claims managers and accident repairers. Some even compete with one another. Through the QBE Buyers Club, they have collectively committed to fund the restoration of 18 acres within Boothby Wildland, a 617-hectare rewilding project managed by Nattergal.
They will receive verified carbon credits generated by the project, along with annual reports on how the land is recovering. They can visit it themselves, witnessing the land recovering to its former glory over time. Nature Broking structured the consortium so that several corporate buyers could combine their demand around one long-term project rather than purchasing separately.
That combination of carbon and collaboration offers one possible answer to a persistent problem in nature restoration: how to secure enough private capital, for long enough, to allow recovery to happen.
What happens to the land
Boothby Wildland is a former arable farm in Lincolnshire, bought by Nattergal in 2021. It has variable grade three soils, patches of ancient woodland and the West Glen river running through it. Intensive farming had reduced much of its ecological value. The site is now being rewilded, allowing natural processes to return and using targeted interventions where they can accelerate recovery.
Which brings us back to the beavers. Beavers disappeared from Britain several hundred years ago after being hunted to extinction. Earlier this year, a family of four Eurasian beavers were released into the West Glen. Their usefulness comes from what they do to a river. Beaver dams slow the movement of water, create wetland habitat and raise the surrounding water table. On a landscape scale, reproducing those effects through conventional engineering can be difficult and expensive.
The beavers do it for nothing. The carbon story is less visible, but as natural vegetation establishes and root systems develop, organic carbon accumulates below ground.
Research at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, one of the UK's best studied large-scale rewilding projects, has found that rewilded soils can store carbon at rates comparable with established broadleaf woodland, with much of the sequestration taking place underground rather than in the trees and vegetation that are easier to see and measure.
Across Boothby Wildland as a whole, the project is estimated to sequester around 110,000 tonnes of CO2e over 50 years.
The QBE Buyers Club's 18 acres sit within that larger site. Its eight members fund restoration in their designated area and receive verified carbon credits generated by the project. They can visit Boothby and will receive annual reports tracking its recovery.
Financing recovery
Restoring nature at this scale requires money that can simply stay put. Carbon provides one powerful way of bringing corporate capital into projects such as Boothby. Companies already have emissions targets and established systems for measuring and reporting against them. Pressure to understand emissions across their value chains is also increasing as sustainability reporting develops internationally.
So a verified carbon credit therefore gives businesses a mechanism they understand and can account for, while providing nature projects with a source of private finance. Of course, carbon cannot describe everything happening at Boothby. A tonne of CO2 does not capture the return of a species, changes in water quality or a landscape's ability to hold back a flood. Biodiversity markets, public funding, regulation and philanthropy can all contribute to financing those wider benefits. But carbon has an important advantage: there is already substantial corporate demand for it.
The quality of what sits behind a credit remains crucial. Buyers need confidence in the methodology and verification, and in the project generating it. A direct relationship with a named project can also give them something that a more conventional purchase may not: the ability to follow what happens on the ground over time.
At Boothby, the Buyers Club members know which land they are supporting. They can visit it and see how it changes. And because the commitment runs for 50 years, they have good reason to remain interested.
Why buy together?
The next problem is scale. A company purchasing 500 credits a year may be able to support a relatively small intervention. A group of companies investing collectively can provide enough capital to support restoration as part of a larger, long-term project.
Nature Broking built the framework that allows the eight companies to participate in the same Boothby project while retaining their own agreements and carbon allocations.
QBE's supply chain provided a natural group of buyers. The companies already have commercial relationships with one another, share clients and, in some cases, compete for the same work.
Competition turns out not to preclude collaboration on nature. Supply chains could therefore provide a useful structure for aggregating corporate demand. Instead of assembling unrelated buyers around a project, companies can work through relationships that already exist.
Nature Broking is developing similar consortium approaches in other sectors, including professional services, where companies often share clients and face similar pressure to demonstrate environmental progress.
The principle could apply more widely. Many individual companies have the appetite to fund high-quality nature projects but may lack the scale to support significant restoration alone. Bringing that demand together changes what their money can fund.
The 50-year experiment
There is still something distinctly unusual about asking a company to commit to anything for half a century.
The people who signed the Boothby agreements will not be the people reporting on their final year. Companies will change leadership and strategy. Some may change ownership. Carbon methodologies will develop, as will the expectations placed on businesses investing in nature.
The landscape will change too. Soil carbon is harder to measure than a row of newly planted trees, and a recovering ecosystem will not follow a corporate project plan. Species will arrive and disappear. The river will alter. Some assumptions made at the beginning of the project will inevitably look different with the benefit of several decades of evidence.
Long-term nature finance has to accommodate that uncertainty. It requires credible verification, legal agreements that can survive corporate change and reporting that tells buyers what is actually happening rather than simply whether a project is meeting its original projections.
There is a practical challenge here for the wider nature market. Long-term structures need to be rigorous enough to give buyers confidence without becoming so complicated or expensive that only the largest companies can participate. The QBE Buyers Club is one attempt to solve that problem by spreading a long-term commitment across several organisations and connecting them directly to the project their money supports.
Perhaps that is the more interesting experiment taking place at Boothby. Rewilding asks what happens when we give natural processes enough space and time to recover. The corporate experiment is whether businesses can learn to finance nature on something closer to those terms. Fifty years should begin to tell us.