Applying for the Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF): opportunities, process, experience   

The Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF) aims to stimulate private markets to improve and safeguard our domestic natural environment by helping projects get ready for private investment. 

The NEIRF is a competitive scheme providing grants of between £10,000 and £100,000 to support the development of environmental projects in England that:

• help achieve one or more natural environmental outcomes from the Government’s 25-Year Environment Plan
• have the ability to produce revenue from ecosystem services to attract and repay investment
• produce an investment model that can be scaled up and reproduced

The NEIRF programme is being delivered by the Environment Agency, on behalf of Defra, with support from the Green Finance Institute, Ecosystems Knowledge Network and Natural England.

In this webinar, you will hear from expert speakers who have developed and run the Fund, who will run through the application process and objectives of the grants and briefly share the steps to investment readiness. You will also have an opportunity to learn from two example initiatives.

The Swinton Estate in North Yorkshire, who were successful recipients of funding through the first NEIRF round this year. Their project is working to develop a new business model for multi-functional forestry to realise wider benefits from carbon sequestration, biodiversity credits, recreation, and water quality.

In response to a changing political and policy landscape Buccleuch are prioritising new investment in environmental science and technology that enable our farms and estates to explore and respond to new opportunities in land use.  Currently we continue to verify credible and repeatable base lines across all estates, due for completion in late 2022 with the purpose of evidencing best-practice in natural capital reporting and enhancement modelling that in turn will establish the basis of a portfolio offering.