Seven solutions could unlock private demand for UK natural flood management projects, boosting the market for such initiatives should the government adopt them, a Green Finance Institute (GFI) expert group has said.
These actions include introducing open-access mapping software for projects, a database for recording natural flood management (NFM) assets, and development of NFM standards, GFI said.
“There is limited buyside demand for the flood risk reduction or ecosystem services generated by NFM,” GFI said in a 117-page report.
“Proposed NFM projects, in which the private sector is a provider of capital, often as a co-funder with the public sector, are stalling.”
The report aims to help overcome the barriers. A 20-member group spanning finance, local government, and academia wrote the document, which was broadly supported by organisations including Finance Earth, Aviva, and WWF.
NFM involves working with nature in an area to reduce flood risk, through practices such as improved soil management, planting woodland, or creating ponds. Flooding is the UK’s number one climate threat, causing millions of pounds of damage annually, GFI said.
Digging a pond at the base of a slope, on…
