Urban Greening Code Development

BACKGROUND

Nature Towns and Cities is a coalition of organisations (National Trust, Natural England, and National Lottery Heritage Fund) working together to inspire, incentivise, and support UK towns and cities to take ambitious action for urban green space. Our aim is to help millions more people enjoy time in nature close to home, in greener, thriving towns and cities. We want more urban areas to use nature recovery and nature-based solutions to tackle health inequalities and climate change, and to put nature at the heart of communities to grow their prosperity, connection and resilience.

This commission sits within the Nature Finance workstream of Nature Towns and Cities. Nature Towns and Cities is looking to support Local Authorities and their partners in accessing private funding. Specifically, through developing a marketplace of tokenised urban greening interventions - starting with Urban Tree Tokens - supported by an urban greening code and registry.

SCOPE OF THE WORK

Nature Towns and Cities holds a draft code - an adaptation of BSI Flex 701 - for tokenising urban greening interventions, and a methodology specifically for urban tree tokens. This research is seeking to test and refine the code through stakeholder engagement, and to understand what the governance, structuring and operations of a code and associated marketplace and registry should look like, resulting in the production of a governance and operations report, (including summary and recommended strawman code and registry governance and operations options and mapping of code, registry and marketplace responsibilities/roles), marketplace governance eligibility criteria and governance framework, and refined Urban Greening Code.

INFORMATION TO BE RETURNED

Submissions should include the following information:

Submissions should be no more than 8 pages in length. Abridged VCs can be included as appendices.

These should be returned to anne.mackinnon@nationaltrust.org.uk by the deadline of 5pm, Friday 24th October 2025.

Please see the attached Request for Tender document for more detail.