The Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) - Successful Round 3 Projects

The project will expand Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENs) and inform policy development for nature finance in Scotland and beyond. Building on previous FIRNS support for the successful launch of the Leven LENs in February 2025, the project will include a delivery component to 1) drive trading nature-based solutions in the Leven, 2) extend to adjacent zones - Allan Water, Devon, Fife and potentially Perth, 3) replicate LENs in a new Scottish region - Borders/Tweed, and 4) map stakeholder interest for LENs beyond these immediate zones. 

Accelerating uptake of LENs in Scotland, the project will engage businesses across water, agriculture, whisky, textiles, and tourism, laying the foundations for a cumulative £16.2 million in nature investment by 2030. 

The project aims to facilitate the recovery of some of Scotland’s most depleted habitats across the Arkaig catchment at scale and at pace, and to demonstrate the viability of external private investment in enabling delivery. The project has already worked through several challenges, sharing lessons learnt (including in a case study for NatureScot). 

Nature Finance Fife (NFF), a regional delivery vehicle for blending philanthropic, public and private finances for the benefit of nature and people, will be launched. Composed of a natural capital producers farming co-operative, trusted project developer and environment bank. 

The emerging Ecosystem Restoration Code will be tested with the aim of delivering a stacked credit on the Dreel Burn, alongside a charismatic carbon offset and enabling carbon insets – a catchment covering 5,000 hectares of mainly arable land and producers of organic meat.

An exemplar project for the blending of agricultural reform subsidies with natural capital market investments, securing a range of government priorities on climate resilience, good food nation and the just transition to a green economy. 

This project builds on two earlier FIRNS projects and aims to bring a Scottish Rivers Fund to market. The earlier FIRNS projects laid the way for the Fund’s governance mechanism and identified delivery-ready river restoration projects as the initial market offer to potential Fund contributors. The Fund will use the example of SMEEF to attract corporate contributions to fund the delivery of place-based projects. 

This FIRNS project will focus on the strategic and focused marketing to potential corporate contributors with the offer to purchase nature-related and social outcomes delivered through place-based river catchment restoration projects. Fund governance and procedures for application, awards and monitoring will be established and tested with three pilot projects. 

Fisheries Management Scotland will work closely with NatureScot, SEPA and Scottish Government to ensure alignment with emergent and ongoing policy. The legacy is to achieve transformative catchment-scale restoration action and heightened recognition of the importance of rivers supported by an innovative nature market mechanism. 

In FIRNS 3, GFT proposes to take what has been learned and delivered in the upper catchment and to expand this considerably by rolling out this process in both the mid and lower catchment. This would achieve catchment-scale coverage and would allow the project to put the process developed in FIRNS 2 into action.

This will not only further the project along but will also significantly increase its value and appeal to a broader number and variety of private funders due to the significantly greater scale and diversity comprised within the ‘offer’.

In FIRNS 3 the project will ramp up the marketing of this project, employing novel means of engaging with funders near and far, as well as bringing more local people and organisations together through the project. With a discernible product and ‘offer’ to funders GFT can work increasingly closely with South of Scotland Enterprise and others seeking to market and draw in private investment to the regions natural capital.

The project will also explore and work closely with local contractors and businesses who might have an interest in working on projects in this sector to ensure the skills and expertise required to deliver restoration works are increasingly available within the local area, and that investment is shared amongst local communities and businesses.

The project aims to address demand and supply side barriers to unlock institutional investment.

On the demand side it will seek to solve the two main barriers to unlocking institutional investment:

1. Securing a forward purchase agreement. We will develop a carbon credit forward purchase agreement with a buyer. Investors require such a revenue guarantee to reduce market risk and secure their commitment to invest in natural capital projects.

2. The delayed cashflow for investors. Investors are discouraged by the 15-25 years required for their investment return. We will demonstrate how a novel mixed-aged project portfolio approach will generate earlier returns to help unlock institutional investment.

In FIRNS 3, Project L-and will test how the emerging Ecosystem Restoration Code could be used to fund ecosystem enhancement projects in the Pentland Hills. This project will also develop a nature crediting scheme in collaboration with CreditNature. The result will be an investible project to attract funding for delivery and ongoing land management that delivers verifiable improvements to the local ecology and park infrastructure. 

The NARIA metrics will be used in a cluster context by collecting high-quality data on ecosystem condition within the required timeframe and across the different farms. This will produce consistent, comparable, accurate, cost effective and reliable metrics. This work will be supported with ongoing discussions with buyers to support the development of the code and community engagement. 

The project will build on the success of the FIRNS Round 1 project (Make Rewilding Your Business) to secure more private investment to finance the restoration of Scotland’s nature, and move towards this becoming a self-sustaining area of our work. This will involve:

• Stewarding existing business partners (buyers) already funding nature restoration via our Rewilding Fund, to maintain and grow their commitment.
• Attracting new business partners and exploring new models to secure more investment for nature restoration at land partner (seller) sites across our Northwoods Rewilding Network and Loch Abar Mòr landscape-scale partnership.
• Fully developing our newly formed partnership with SSEN Transmission to prove this model of biodiversity net gain (BNG) investment.
• Exploring the potential for further biodiversity net gain (BNG) investment partnerships across relevant sectors.
• Driving more community engagement by our land partners (sellers), through training, peer-to-peer mentoring and events to connect local communities to nature restoration in a meaningful way.

The Moray Cluster Farm aims to pioneer nature-friendly farming within a climate-resilient landscape at scale. The NRF project has provided critical funding to baseline existing habitats and assess the feasibility of various biodiversity-enhancing interventions. However, for farming with nature to succeed, it must be both ecologically and financially sustainable. Currently, funding options for these interventions are extremely limited. Available support typically covers only capital costs or, at best, includes short-term maintenance payments, which are insufficient for long-term viability. To sustain a nature-enriched, productively farmed landscape, farm businesses must generate profitable, long-term income streams. 

The project will establish a suitable governance structure and delivery plan to effectively implement the NRF-designed interventions through private finance, with a focus on biodiversity enhancement compliance markets. The cluster structure intends to enable farm-scale businesses to access private ecosystem service markets, which have so far been limited to large landholdings with specialist professional support.

This project aims to develop an investible natural capital proposition with Forestry & Land Scotland in the Angus Glens, directly supporting FLS’s organisational priorities of increasing land-based commercial opportunities to ensure financial sustainability while tackling climate change and biodiversity loss. The project will model potential investment structures within public land stewardship principles, ensuring compatibility with FLS’s land management objectives and community benefit delivery. 

Partners will seek to identify high-integrity investors aligned with Scottish Government ethical investment principles and FLS’s commitment to landscape-scale partnership working. The project will deliver investment relevant materials, refined financial models, and explore funding appetite amongst investors to test the viability of private investment pathways for nature restoration on publicly owned land. 

This FIRNS project directly enables FLS’s Angus Glens vision through innovative funding mechanisms, supporting woodland creation, plantation-to-native woodland transition, low density woodland scrub at high elevation, native riparian woodland creation, and montane habitat restoration, while creating sustainable business opportunities that reduce reliance on public funding. 

Our goal with this project is to further develop a viable biodiversity methodology for peatland and woodland in Scotland. The Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) and Peatland Code (PC) have set high integrity standards and have made significant progress in understanding the emerging biodiversity market. There is a strong interest in quantifying biodiversity and the metrics which have been developed for these habitats are viable. 

The FIRNS1 project produced a methodology for baselining biodiversity quantification. Feedback from public and academic sources highlighted missing datasets crucial for successful implementation. This next phase focuses on data aggregation and analysis to estimate credit potential for sites, create a community similarity index to contextualise results for UK woodlands and peatlands, and refine the framework for better accessibility and uptake.