Another day, another initiative in the UK Farm to Fork charm offensive. This time, an announcement from secretary of State Thérèse Coffey of what she describes as the first ever ‘Nature for Finance’ event to bring together farmers, land managers, investors and conservation experts to identify new investment opportunities that drive forward actions to mobilise investment in nature recovery while continuing to keep the nation fed. She used that event to announce the intention to launch an additional round of the Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF) later this year to help farmers address barriers to accessing private investment to help nature’s recovery.
The stated purpose of the additional round of the NEIRF will be to focus specifically on the farming sector, helping farmers to come together at a landscape scale to combine their offer to investors, and enabling more types of farmer to access and benefit from nature markets.
For most farmers and landowners the route to access emerging nature markets is, to say the least, opaque (almost as opaque as the language used by the Secretary of Sate) and this initiative is therefore welcome and necessary. We would also like to think that it is as a direct result of the Secretary of State reading our news posts.
