The UK’s natural environment is in decline increasing our exposure to problems like floods, drought, and pollution. This is creating costs for all of us through our taxes, utility bills and insurance premiums.

For issues like flooding, investing in natural infrastructure solutions could be considerably cheaper than remediation and hard defences, while reducing risk and delivering significant environmental improvements. Yet, so far, they have been implemented at too small scale to make much difference. They have also failed to attract funding from private organisations which could benefit from them.

This event launched a new report by Green Alliance and the National Trust, New markets for land and nature: how Natural Infrastructure Schemes could pay for a better environment, setting out a market mechanism to incentivise a new approach to land management.