Mapping all reported ecosystem and species conservation investments nationwide

For the first time, scientists have produced a complete financial X-ray of an entire nation’s spending on nature — and the image that emerges is as alarming as it is unprecedented. In a study published on 29 August 2026 in the journal Ambio, researchers at the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery traced every publicly reported investment in ecosystem and species conservation across the United Kingdom, following money through government schemes, banks, pension funds, carbon markets, and philanthropic foundations. Their verdict: roughly £1.15 billion flows to British nature each year, but the most important finding is not the number itself — it is how much of the money supposedly going to nature cannot be verified as ever reaching it. At a moment when 118 countries have set national targets linked to Target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for mobilising US$200 billion a year for biodiversity by 2030, the study exposes a systemic blindness at the very heart of global conservation finance.

Humanity is in the midst of a nature crisis that, if unabated, threatens not only the intrinsic value of the living world but serious financial damage to companies and entire economies. Yet the figures routinely used to describe the response have been sharply criticised. Independent analyses have shown that spending unrelated to biodiversity has been folded into headline conservation totals, that definitions shift from report to report, and that there is little evidence about whether funded projects actually work. Some schemes have channelled hundreds of millions in apparent conservation spending while delivering limited ecological improvement, while interventions as cheap as securing the land rights of biodiversity stewards can deliver enormous gains. Ecologists have long known that the cost-effectiveness of conservation actions varies enormously, meaning an identical budget can generate wildly different outcomes depending on where and how it is deployed. Without knowing what is being funded and where, even hitting a global finance target could leave biodiversity no better off.

To cut through this fog, Alice Stuart and Sophus O. S. E. zu Ermgassen did something deceptively simple: they counted. Between March and June 2025, drawing on expert knowledge, scoping searches, and consultation with government officials, the pair compiled a database of every scheme and actor in the UK with evidence of funding nature, grouped into five categories — government-origin funding, philanthropic funding, financial institutions, markets and project platforms, and private capital and operational spending. They then mined annual reports, charity registries, and market registers to extract flows for the 2023/24 financial year, rating each source’s transparency from low to very high. Crucially, the team adopted a deliberately narrow definition of nature finance: money disbursed through individual schemes or transactions specifically focused on ecosystems and species, coming as close as possible to reporting money verifiably spent on conservation, restoration, and sustainable activities. That contrasts with the self-reported aggregates behind global estimates such as the UN Environment Programme’s State of Finance for Nature, which tallies public biodiversity finance at US$82.2 billion and private at just US$7.2 billion.

Public money dominates the British picture. The researchers identified 43 government schemes through which money could reach nature in 2023/24, and found usable funding data for 33 of them, totalling £703.9 million — more than 60% of all identified flows. The largest single channel was agri-environment farming schemes, estimated at £389.1 million. Reaching that figure required technical surgery: because agri-environment payments also fund heritage buildings, fencing, and public access, the team split England’s Countryside Stewardship and Sustainable Farming Incentive spending into eight categories, counting only those clearly targeting ecosystems and species — priority habitats, other natural habitats, farmland habitat, and hedgerows, trees, and orchards. On average, 59.5% of disbursements qualified as nature finance, and that share was applied across UK-wide agri-environment spending. Government grants added £314.8 million, the majority for habitat creation and restoration (£156.6 million), with woodland (£104.2 million) and peatland (£39.3 million) projects dominating — a double mandate of biodiversity recovery and carbon capture. Only one verifiable public financial institution transaction emerged: a £12 million National Wealth Fund loan to Highlands Rewilding to buy Scotland’s Tayvallich Estate.

One surprise concerns where the public money comes from: a large share is not drawn directly from taxation but retrospectively earmarked from the proceeds of sovereign green bonds. In 2023–24, £9.9 billion from green gilt issuance and £0.9 billion from green savings bonds were allocated to the UK’s Green Financing Programme, and £992.8 million of that — 9.2% — went to “Living & Natural Resources,” of which £671.38 million met the study’s definition of investment in nature: £615.4 million from green gilts and £55.9 million from green bonds. In effect, a substantial share of 2023–2024 English agri-environment spending — £764.8 million of it — and £220.2 million for the Nature for Climate Fund was financed retrospectively through debt instruments sold to investors. The exercise also exposed how official statistics disagree with themselves: HM Treasury’s function-based classification records just £583 million of public spending on “biodiversity and landscape” in 2023/24, while the government’s own biodiversity indicator, which counts a portion of farm payments and lottery funding, reports £1,066 million for the same year.

Private finance, long heralded as the salvation of conservation funding, turned out to be modest — and murky. Total private flows reached £142.4 million, composed of corporate philanthropy (£71.5 million), return-seeking investment and loans (£50.7 million), and credit and unit purchases in nature markets (£20.2 million). The philanthropy figure is dominated by a single insurer: Aviva pledged £70.9 million across four organisations — £38.9 million to the Wildlife Trusts for temperate rainforest restoration, £21 million to the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust for a 17-year carbon sequestration project, £10 million to the Woodland Trust, and £1 million to WWF’s community fund. Return-seeking investment included £11.9 million of nature loans from Oxbury Bank, £3.8 million from Triodos to the charity Avon Needs Trees, and an estimated £35 million from asset manager Gresham House into Environment Bank, which creates and sells biodiversity net gain habitat banks. England’s biodiversity net gain offset market generated a minimum of £7.6 million in 2024–25, based on 286.8 offsite biodiversity units sold by 31 May 2025 at roughly £25,500 per unit for the cheapest and most common habitat type, plus £247,416 in statutory government credits. Voluntary carbon codes added £12.6 million, chiefly the Woodland Carbon Code (£7.5 million) and the Peatland Code (£4.7 million).

Philanthropy and non-governmental organisations proved the second-largest source of money for nature, at £388.5 million — largely because UK charity law forces foundations and NGOs to publish their accounts. Using grant data from the Environmental Funders Network, the team found 1,808 nature-related grants in 2021/22 worth £68.5 million, but excluded 809 of them, worth £22.6 million, because their descriptions suggested they primarily targeted social rather than environmental outcomes. That left £45.9 million across 999 grants, adjusted upward to £54.4 million to account for inflation. To this they added the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s estimate of £348.2 million in annual biodiversity spending by 41 large NGOs, carefully subtracting £11.9 million in grants that would otherwise have been double-counted against the NGO figure. Even here, transparency was only moderate: projects were usually named, but their locations were rarely disclosed.

More damning still is what the researchers could not find. Of the 37 private financial institutions assessed, 86.5% either gave no value for nature investments or reported only generic “green” or “sustainable” figures that, on inspection, consisted overwhelmingly of renewable energy, mortgages for energy-efficient homes, and low-emission vehicle finance — numbers that would substantially inflate estimates if treated as nature finance. The deeper problems, however, are structural: the same flow of money is reported differently by different bodies — financial versus calendar years, budgets versus disbursed payments, promises versus actual transfers. Double counting lurks everywhere: Gresham House’s £35 million investment in habitat banks overlaps with the biodiversity net gain unit purchases it part-finances, because market revenues repay investors rather than fund new restoration, and Aviva’s donations similarly overlap with the operational spending of recipient NGOs. The researchers therefore excluded market transactions from their headline figure altogether — including them would lift the total from £1.15 billion to just £1.16 billion, showing how little verified money trades through Britain’s celebrated nature markets. Verified unit transactions were also almost 30 times lower than demand estimated from an analysis of 500 planning applications. Centralised registers for offset markets improve project-level transparency but cannot resolve double counting or capture on-site and operational spending, which remains almost invisible.

Regulation, the study shows, is the real engine of private money — and its opaque bookkeeping is the real obstacle. Water companies in England and Wales, whose budgets the regulator Ofwat scrutinises on a five-year price review cycle, have pledged £22.1 billion of environmental investment for 2025–2030 — roughly four times the previous period — with £3.2 billion earmarked for nature-based solutions. Yet of the 18,598 actions in the published Water Industry National Environment Programme, 67.5% are investigation and monitoring, and 21% are grey infrastructure such as storm tanks; only 5.7% — 1,052 actions — directly concern species or habitat conservation, with another 1.4% identifiable as nature-based water quality solutions. Nearly half of all actions trace back to the Environment Act 2021 — proof of how powerfully regulation can mobilise private capital, and of how poorly the resulting spending is described.

For the UK government, the numbers cut both ways. Britain’s £1.1 billion represents just 0.7% of the US$200 billion the world must mobilise annually under Target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal agreement, but it amounts to 38.8% of the UK’s fair share when scaled to the country’s 1.9% of global GDP — all of it currently landing on domestic nature. Progress toward the government’s pledge to raise £500 million in private finance for England’s nature recovery every year by 2027 is visible but fragile: the largest single private flow found, £35 million, existed only because regulation created a market, and demand for biodiversity net gain units has since grown more than six-fold, implying a likely minimum flow of about £50 million a year — though recent planning exemptions could shrink it again. The authors also warn of cost shifting, where private markets displace rather than add to public and philanthropic funding. Their prescription is simple but radical: assess nature finance as one interacting system, track not just how much money moves but what it buys, and fix transparency urgently — because without it, no country can honestly claim to know whether its money is saving nature.