We’ve been part of the Local Investment in Natural Capital (LINC) programme over the past year, delivering an Urban Pilot focused on building a Green Asset Bank for the City of York and North Yorkshire. The programme aimed to explore how natural capital projects could attract investment and scale – testing live projects, engaging buyers, and learning what it takes to turn vision into investable pipelines.
We had the pleasure of attending the LINC showcase event in York, which brought together all the pilot teams from across the country. It was a chance to reflect on the scale and diversity of activity across landscapes, share learnings, and identify where this growing sector goes next.
What is LINC?
LINC (Local Investment in Natural Capital), led by the Green Finance Institute and supported by DEFRA, set out to test how local places can mobilise investment in nature recovery by developing investable pipelines and revenue models for natural capital.
Each pilot sought to address three core aims:
- Build capacity and capability
- Develop an investment-ready pipeline
- Establish a shared body of learning
Four Local/Combined Authority Boundaries were funded through the LINC programme:
- York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority
- Landscape scale &
- Urban Pilot, led by wild natured
- West Midlands Combined Authority
- Cornwall Council
- Northumberland, Cumberland Westmorland and Furness (Borderlands)
Themes Emerging from the Pilots
Across geographies, some clear insights and shared challenges emerged:
Revenues
- Demand remains fragmented, with liquidity and visibility still forming, bringing forward aggregated demand to meet timing of investment is a challenge
- BNG (Biodiversity Net Gain) as a mandated and standardised market mechanism, was the primary revenue-generating nature market in many pilots
- Climate resilience markets are an exciting space to watch, however increased standardisation and guidance would support growth and accessibility
Funding
- Investor interest is high; however, underwriting remains challenging due to nascency of routes-to-market, first-mover investors still fit under semi-philanthropic with loose requirements on ROI
- Continued government support is needed to build confidence, attract investment and support the market growth
Project pipeline
- Early-stage funding is crucial in enabling pipeline development, enabling de-risking for investment; this is particularly important for complex, multi-benefit projects or new markets like nutrient neutrality or natural flood management (NFM).
- Data availability, getting early-stage economic information is a major challenge & very resource intensive
Our Urban Pilot – Green Asset Bank, Part of the for York and North Yorkshire LINC programme
Our focus was on demonstrating a range of projects for learning across environmental and social outcomes, with requirement for projects to demonstrate financial returns in an urban-region context. Working closely with local authorities, stakeholders and buyers, we developed a portfolio of six projects from over 300 sites across York and North Yorkshire:
- 4 BNG-focused pilots (3 habitat and 1 watercourse), all with co-benefits
- 1 Natural Food Management (Pond attenuation for surface water)
- 1 Urban Health Pilot (targeting air quality and urban heat improvements)
Our approach combined bottom-up site fundamentals with a top-down buyer-led design. We built a robust pricing and procurement database, and engaged with 30+ local buyers across public and private sectors, including corporates and sponsors.
We experienced many of the same challenges as other pilots:
- Building early-stage economics information was resource intensive:
- we are building a ‘price your project’ product to support future projects from our learning!
- Using local interest groups is critical for smaller project for viability
- Building confidence in demand returns is essential to project success
- Through pilots we demonstrated live pathways to revenue across three key categories:
- credit markets such as BNG,
- climate resilience, such as NFM,
- and sponsorship models.
- Urban pilots benefit from proximity to local corporates, which can unlock place-based funding aligned with ESG goals.
- We specialise in combining bottom-up environmental and social fundamentals with top-down buyer led design
A spotlight
Our learnings from the other pilots: we were blown away by the amazing work and varied interpretation of the brief.
West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA)
WMCA also focused on the urban context and focused on pipeline development, their slick and structured process is one I can’t wait to see more of when they publish results in the next month!
Showcasing the largest pipeline with over 200+ natural capital projects valued at £20bn, underpinned by a clearly structured regional investment strategy.
Their platform identifies the key pathway to funding for each project with three major routes identified:
- Investment unit-based markets: primarily BNG led investible projects
- Impact-led projects: primarily CSR funding, no ROI
- Innovation & accelerator pathways : new market opportunities support to become investable
This strategic approach provides a compelling blueprint for regions looking to build a green-asset pipeline; across urban and peri-urban contexts.
Cornwall Council – Exchange Platform and Local Innovation
Cornwall took a grassroots approach, focusing on upskilling internal teams and building local capacity. They launched a Cornwall Natural Capital Exchange platform, acting as a shop window for investment-ready projects.
They are focussed on embedding policy including their imminent Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) and marine nature recovery framework to ensure that all of the strategy works together.
Whilst also testing:
- A crowdfunding scheme called Love Where You Are, allowing local businesses to contribute to nature projects.
- A potential visitor levy model for channelling tourism-based contributions into natural capital.
This local-first approach is great example of aligning public and private finance and create a self-sustaining model that can progress even without big-ticket investment, by starting small and embedding nature funding into local infrastructure.
North Yorkshire Council – Landscape Aggregation & Buyers Club
North Yorkshire has the scale to attract major investment, but faces the challenge of demand fragmentation. Their solution: aggregating projects and aligning them to clear investor mandates.
They took 50+ projects and refined them into three demonstration pilots, with three distinct focusses:
- BNG & Carbon + social impact
- Natural Flood Management & water quality
- Soil carbon & regenerative agriculture
They plan to develop a Buyers Club as a next step to unite anchor buyers (e.g. councils, landowners, institutions), increasing confidence and potential liquidity in the market. Their demand-side thinking really pushed the envelope for rural project delivery at scale.
Credit to WSP & Great Yellow
Borderlands
Cumbria – Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV)
The Borderlands team spans Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland and Furness.
Lucy Lawrence-Bell, showcased a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) model in partnership with Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Cumberland Council and the Lake District National Park. The SPV is designed to be future-proof, able to handle BNG, nutrient neutrality and emerging environmental markets and policy changes.
They explored three delivery models:
- Brokerage: connecting landowners and developer buyers (with legal responsibilities sitting with the landowner)
- Bank: the developer contracts with SPV, the legal responsibilities sit with the SPV and landowner gets paid regular informed income with no involvement in the complexities
- Hybrid: this approach balances risk and flexibility allowing the landowner to retain legal interest in their land but share some of the legal responsibilities
The hybrid option was favoured. Legal and financial structures are now in testing, with a business case decision due in July 2025. This work could unlock habitat banking at scale across Cumbria.
Northeast Combined Authority – Carbon & Nature Marketplace
Dan Wales Hart shared plans to launch a regional carbon and nature marketplace in May 2025. The platform focuses on nature recovery, decarbonisation, and social value and will
- List woodland and peatland credits
- Fund social housing retrofit through “retrofit credits”
- Support nature and community energy projects
It’s an exciting time, with £1.5 – 1.9m in initial funding and ~2,500 carbon credits ready for launch, this platform represents a bold move toward testing a unified marketplace model that’s easy for buyers and sellers to engage with –rooted in regional outcomes, this pilot offers significant future potential across the Northeast.
Final Thoughts
We’ve got our fingers crossed that DEFRA continues to support this work so that we can take these pipelines and testbeds and scale them across more places.
What’s clear is that the LINC pilots are not just proof-of-concept – they’re beginning to shift real investment into nature, and helping define how local, place-based finance can power climate, biodiversity and community outcomes.
If you’re exploring similar projects – particularly in urban or place-based settings – and are looking for help turning site ambitions into investable pipelines, drop us a line. We’d love to share what we’ve learned.
