Pathways to Participation: Reducing Barriers for Farmers in Biodiversity Markets

Farming with nature should not be a charitable act. It should make business sense. We are not there yet. The task now is to create the conditions in which nature-positive decisions are commercially rational, practically achievable and socially normal.

Dr Laura Underdown

I started this scholarship wanting to understand everything I could about nature markets: who was paying for what and where, which public and private schemes were emerging, how biodiversity was being measured, and how to make sure incentives were paying for real outcomes on farm. My hypothesis was simple: the barriers to engagement were technical, financial and knowledge-based; get the science, measurement and market mechanisms right, and we could create a win-win for farming profitability and nature.

After two years, 10 countries and over 100 conversations with farmers, businesses, investors, policymakers, researchers and advisers, I have come to a different conclusion. The biggest barrier to creating resilient natural capital on farm is not our ability to measure nature or design markets. It is creating the conditions in which farmers can confidently act.

The UK is well advanced internationally on market architecture. We have public environmental schemes, Biodiversity Net Gain and emerging private voluntary markets, alongside increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring and verifying outcomes. Yet farmer participation remains difficult. The landscape is complex, costs can fall disproportionately on farmers, and many businesses do not have the financial headroom or confidence to take on another layer of risk.

The barriers I encountered were often less about understanding the technical or environmental constraints, and more about confidence, motivation, risk and resilience. Better metrics, technology and market mechanisms will have limited impact if farmers do not feel able, or have sufficient incentive, to act.

Farming and nature are not opposing objectives. Food production is underpinned by resilient natural capital. For farming, nature is a necessity, not a nice to have. None of the farmers I met wanted to harm the natural environment, but many felt they had not been afforded the luxury of being able to prioritise it. We have spent decades defining agricultural success primarily through food production, while asking farmers to absorb much of the cost and risk of managing for wider outcomes.

The starting point is therefore not the same for every farm. This means taking a business-first approach, not a market-first approach: looking within the farm boundary to understand farm economics, risks and dependencies, then to natural capital opportunities and solutions for building resilience in. For some, managing natural capital is already part of good farming. Others need a clearer financial return. For many, the most convincing route may be through lower input costs, improved long-term productivity and business resilience. There is no single message that will engage everyone. We need to understand what makes action possible for different businesses and build confidence and incentives around those levers.

Nature also does not respect farm boundaries. The strongest examples I saw combined trusted, independent facilitation, farmer collaboration and long-term investment. Collective approaches can reduce costs and risk while delivering the connected, landscape-scale outcomes that nature requires. 

I therefore finish this scholarship with a different question from the one I started with: how do we build a system in which farmers are confident and able to act, and in which doing the right thing for nature is also the right thing for the farm business?