From July 2023 to May 2024 our partnership group will be preparing a plan of how to pay for all the nature restoration projects needed to regenerate the River Ericht catchment. 

Part of our work will be to design a new Special Purpose Vehicle through which ‘blended finance’, which means both public and private  funding, can be channelled. This will involve:

• Establishing a business case to justify the public and private investment required to restore the catchment in partnership with landowners.
• Establishing a set of ecological, environmental and social project standards and indicators for the restoration that makes sure the habitat created, extended or improved delivers for both nature and local communities.
• Ensuring that we enable investments that embody the Scottish Government’s new principles to develop a socially fairer, high integrity market.

There will be opportunities for private investors and philanthropic contributions as well as the specialist public funds that are now being directed into landscape scale nature restoration.

We’ll be developing this part of the site to explain these opportunities over the next few months.