Green Finance Flood and Water Governance

Government's target is to raise at least £500 million in private finance for nature's recovery every year by 2027 and increasing to more than £1 billion a year by 2030.

Coordinated investment in nature for water and floods can help the Government's target for private finance in nature's recovery. Investment in nature needs to be linked to a purpose or outcome and fulfilling them requires access to specific land in catchments. Broadly, we need to implement a local asset management approach for nature that is set in the context of long-term planning, and which can work along with other investment in catchments.

Based on several initiatives that are already underway, we believe there is an opportunity to both address the barriers that risk delivery of the water contribution and enable a far greater financial contribution from others. This can be achieved by creating the right framework for engaging stakeholders, providing authoritative decisions and a legal underpinning. Our vision for how this could work is that, in every catchment, decisions about allocation of resources and associated actions achieve the maximum benefit for people and nature.

Defra has recently created an internal working group to develop a land-use delivery framework for the environment to deliver the functional outcomes we need and which should be operated in a partnership context. We believe the framework needs to deliver:

• a)Targeting of action and reconciliation of competing need

• b)A common partnership network

• c)A long-term approach

For us to develop a roadmap for delivering the necessary change, we require Eunomia's experience and expertise to develop a:

• theory of change
• success criteria
• monitoring and evaluation framework.