Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland

The City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) is working with partners, SEPA, Scottish Water and the Scottish Wildlife Trust to develop innovative mechanisms for funding the enhancement and restoration of green space in the city. This work is supported by funding from NatureScot and the National Lottery Heritage Fund through the Scottish Government’s Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) programme.

The project builds on the idea of working out the financial value of proposed improvements to green spaces and nature. This approach identifies the ecosystem services provided by projects with the aim of valuing the improvements these can have on people’s health and wellbeing.

These ecosystem services range from reducing flooding and improving air quality to providing areas for leisure and exercise and come with benefits including to the economy, the just transition and human and environmental health.

The project is currently focusing on flood-risk management, carbon sequestration, biodiversity and wellbeing and a number of sites in Leith and Craigleith are being used as case studies due to the proposed and ongoing development of green space improvements in those areas.

If successful, the project will develop an investment mechanism that will help to fund nature restoration and climate adaptation projects in the city and could be replicated in other urban areas across Scotland.

Nature restoration in urban settings is widely accepted to provide challenges in terms of complexity and cost relative to the amount of nature being restored and as such, cities have often missed out on funding for the enhancement and restoration of green spaces.

This project attempts to develop a mechanism that will allow this obstacle to be overcome and provide more access to high-quality green spaces to more people to enable them to share in the benefits to health, well-being and community that can come from that.