Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership Hosts DEFRA Green Finance Team

Earlier this month, the Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership (OLNP) had the pleasure of hosting a visit from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Green Finance team. Their visit was part of a fact-finding mission to explore how their programme could better support local efforts in nature finance.

During the visit, OLNP partners including 3Keel, Trust for Oxfordshire's Environment, and the North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster discussed several key factors essential for enabling local nature finance:

1. Commercial readiness: Strategies to enhance buyer-side drivers across a range of ecosystem services.

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2. Stacking/bundling: The need for greater clarity on how to balance supply-side bundling (when more than one ecosystem service produced on a piece of land is sold as a single trade or credit to a single buyer) with the demand-side single ecosystem approach.

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3. Local partnerships: The importance of clusters, tenant agreements, the Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENS) approach, the role of Local Nature Partnerships (LNPs), and broader societal engagement to scale up efforts.

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4. Data, reporting, and disclosures: Emphasizing the importance of consistent baselining of habitats and using tools consistently to avoid overloading the amount of indicators you are tracking, and understanding the risk side of the balance sheet to enhance business resilience.

The OLNP were grateful for the opportunity to discuss these details with the team from DEFRA. The OLNP will continue to focus our efforts on understanding and finding solutions to the challenges of delivering a local approach to nature finance. These goals form an important part of the partnership's Nature Finance Strategy.

The OLNP team extends its gratitude to FarmED - The Centre for Farm and Food Education, for their hospitality in the picturesque Cotswolds.