- Groundwork
- Market Engagement
- Groundwork
- Market Engagement
How do I measure the environmental outcomes that I can produce in a robust way?
At this stage you will have developed an overarching vision for your land and a rough plan for what you want to improve. You will now want to make robust baseline measurements of the condition of your land and develop a detailed plan for interventions and intended outcomes. Plans will also include how you intend to maintain your interventions, measure the impact you are having and verify your outcomes in order to sell them.
This milestone contains three subsets of considerations or ‘themes’ that farmers may want to explore at this stage. Click on each of these themes to the right in order to read more.
You can also read case studies of projects that have successfully completed this milestone of development and view a summary of the common activities undertaken at this stage below.
Determining what I need to measure and how
By this point, you will have an idea of where on your land you hope to make an environmental improvement as well as the associated nature market opportunities. You now need to determine what exactly you need to measure to create an accurate picture of the condition of your land now, so you are able to measure, and ultimately sell the improvement you deliver.
This section will walk you through determining what you need to baseline, choosing an appropriate measurement methodology and identifying a service provider which can help you conduct the measurements.
At this stage you will have a rough plan of what you want to sell and how you will deliver it on your farm. In order to demonstrate that your project has delivered environmental improvements, you will need to first develop a baseline of the state of your natural capital before you start implementing your changes. This way, you can show potential buyers that your project has delivered improvements which are additional to what would have occurred under business-as-usual circumstances. The concept of additionality is key to nature markets as it ensures that nature markets are encouraging substantial, verifiable changes rather than rewarding what is already occurring.
What you measure when conducting your baseline will depend on the ecosystem service you are selling. If you are planning a carbon project, you will need to conduct a baseline of the carbon stocks on your land. If you are creating habitats to sell biodiversity net gain units you will need to assess the habitats you already have and their quality. If your intended project could deliver multiple benefits or if you are considering multiple projects for different nature markets, some services offer the ability to baseline multiple ecosystem services at once.
It is generally recommended that, if costs allow, baseline as much of your land and as much natural capital as possible now so that you have the option to sell into markets in the future – particularly future voluntary biodiversity credit markets. Examples of what farmers have measured on their land and how they did it can be found in the case studies for this milestone.
There are many ways to measure ecosystem services but depending on what you are planning to sell, there may be existing codes or metrics that you will need to adhere to when conducting your baseline and measuring your improvements.
For Biodiversity improvement projects your baselining methodology will depend on the market you intend to sell on. If you are aiming for the Biodiversity Net Gain market, you will need to conduct your baseline using Natural England’s Biodiversity Metric. You will also need to make sure you are using the latest version of the metric. As of April, 2024, this is version 4.0. Some farmers are also beginning to anticipate voluntary biodiversity markets and using more innovative methodologies such as eDNA and bioacoustics to baseline and monitor their on-farm biodiversity.
For Soil Carbon projects, there are multiple methodologies you can use to baseline including direct soil sampling, use of remote sensing technologies and modelling soil carbon improvements based on your farming practices. Direct soil sampling will provide the most accurate measure of soil carbon, however it can be costly. Some baselining service providers, such as ecometric, use a combination of direct sampling and remote sensing to balance accuracy and affordability.
For Woodland or Peatland carbon projects there are existing codes which you will use to measure your baseline and calculate uplift. The Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Code offer guidance on how to measure your current and future carbon stock.
For Natural Flood Management or Nutrient Neutrality, the impacts you are attempting to mitigate occur downstream so baselining is more complicated. You would typically be paid for taking specific actions on your farm once poor water quality or risk of flood has been detected downstream, rather than being paid for the delivery of measurable outcomes.
You may have environmental data for your farm already which could be helpful in developing your baseline assessment. Field parcel data, or recent carbon and nutrient assessments may decrease the amount of new data you need to collect. It is important however to ensure that any existing data you are using is up-to-date and was collected using a verified methodology which will be acceptable to buyers.
As an example, Neston Park Estate used existing data on cropping, livestock numbers and medicines, SFI soil analysis and tonnage of product sold to develop its carbon audit using Trinity AgTech’s Sandy software.
In the case of no standard or code, you will need to work closely with buyers or brokers to get their approval on a methodology that includes baselining and estimating the delivery of ecosystem services. For example, Natural Flood Management does not have an existing code for estimating the impact of flood risk interventions, however the end buyer may have a specific method for modelling impacts. Ultimately the end buyer’s approval of your methodology is crucial so using existing codes and certified methodologies where possible is advisable and, where codes are unavailable, engaging with potential buyers early on will help you determine an appropriate way of measuring your ecosystem services.
If you are not yet engaging with buyers or a broker, using methodologies or tools which are certified by a reputable scheme or widely used in your target market will help ensure that your measurements will be acceptable once you find a buyer. You can ask potential service providers about alignment to the BNG Metric, International Standards Organisation (ISO) for carbon footprinting or others before you commit.
If you do not have ecological experience yourself, then there are a host of ecological surveyors that can provide specialist baselining assessment services, ideally those with knowledge of the farming landscape. The Soil Association Exchange would be one example. If you are planning to work with a broker to secure buyers for your ecosystem services, they may provide baselining services as well, or have stipulations on acceptable methodologies. Examples of baselining service providers can be found in the case studies of this milestone.
Before baseline data is collected, it is important that yourself and the surveyor agree on the methodology being used, such as the frequency and depth of soil carbon measurement in the case of soil carbon, to avoid collecting data that is misaligned with your aims and having to repeat the surveying process.
Baselining timelines and costs can vary significantly depending on the environmental outcome you are hoping to deliver and the size of the land parcel you are measuring. Baselining can take as little as a day or up to several months, and range in price from under £100 to tens of thousands of pounds. You may also want to plan for cost overruns and delays, such as in the case of severe weather preventing the ecologist or surveyor from taking accurate data.
For example, a carbon surveyor could baseline the carbon stock of a parcel of arable land of 50 hectares in perfect weather conditions over the course of a day, costing very little other than the time spent. However, developing a nutrient baseline for a waterway passing through a farm would require water samplings to be taken over the course of a year or more, with potential delays in data collection from adverse weather conditions or sewage leaks. Depending on your ecosystem service, baselining may need to take pace at particular times of year, but ongoing measurement should be conducted at the same time each year (or every few years, depending on your monitoring plan).
Before paying for any specific baselining services, you should establish exactly the outputs you are looking for and the timeframe over which these can be delivered.
Measurement of the ecosystem services (particularly baselining) will inevitably involve some ground surveying. However, based on your earlier research there may be specific databases or maps that can shorten the time spent on the ground. For instance, the Defra Data Service Platform has maps that plot the rough depth of peat soils across England and Wales, which can help to indicate what areas are unlikely to be worth testing in ground surveying due to lack of peat depth.
There are some third-party services which offer fully remote baselining. However, most credible buyers will require some form of ground truthing to ensure the environmental benefit is being delivered. Fully remote services may help you to flesh out additional data beyond your target ecosystem service. For example, if you are selling carbon, you may take a remote biodiversity assessment to help demonstrate co-benefits of your carbon project. You would not, however want to use remote data to take a biodiversity assessment if you were hoping to sell BNG units as this would not align with Defra’s mandated Biodiversity Metric.
Though not always necessary, it could be highly beneficial to assess other ‘value add’ aspects of the site in baselining, such as the extent of biodiversity or the public use of the land.
This might also help you to mitigate risks to the project’s success– for example, baselining species may uncover the risk of grazing deer on a BNG site. In addition to risk mitigation, broader baselining can increase the project’s appeal to buyers and investors, who are looking for environmental or social co-benefits. This can in some cases lead to higher prices for your units/credits.
For example, Blaston Estate found that buyers of their carbon credits were interested in the wider environmental context of the farm as well as their connection to the local community when purchasing soil carbon credits from the farm.
There may be opportunities to sell multiple ecosystem services from the same site but there are some limitations to which ecosystems services can be sold together in the UK.
- Stacking – this means you are providing multiple ecosystem services on the same land which are sold under separate contracts. This could be to the same buyer or multiple buyers.
- Bundling – this means bringing together (bundling) multiple ecosystem services in a single landholding and selling as a package.
Defra has set out guidance for combining payments from different nature markets and combining nature markets payments with those from agri-environmental schemes. The most recent guidance can be found here, however it should be noted that these rules are not yet set in stone and may be subject to change. A summary is below:
- Biodiversity + Nutrients: You can sell biodiversity units and nutrient credits from the same piece of land by stacking them. You can sell the units and credits to the same developer or different developers, provided you meet the eligibility criteria for each market.
- Biodiversity OR Nutrients + Carbon: You cannot sell biodiversity net gain units and nutrient credits from the same land used to sell carbon credits unless:
- You can further enhance the habitat beyond what has been done to generate carbon credits
- this does not affect the carbon value
- Biodiversity OR Nutrients + Agri-environment Schemes: You cannot sell an enhancement funded by an agri-environment scheme as a biodiversity unit or nutrient credit. However, you can use the same land to create further habitat enhancements on top of an existing agri-environment agreement.
Note: Defra has commissioned research to determine whether a greater degree of stacking should be permitted between ecosystem service markets. The outputs of this research will be published in summer 2024.
Developing a detailed plan for environmental improvements
Once you have a baseline, you will start planning for making environmental improvements. Choosing appropriate interventions will help to mitigate risks of project failure and maximise the financial opportunities available to the farmers making the change.
In Milestone 1, you set out your overall vision for your land. Now that you have conducted a baseline ecological assessment, you can begin to turn your vision into a detailed plan for environmental improvements.
Your baseline will have told you where there is opportunity for uplift. For instance, if your soils have low levels of organic carbon and your vision includes improving soil health, you may want to introduce practices on your farm aligned with regenerative farming such as maximising soil cover and decreasing your use of synthetic fertiliser to both improve soil fertility and increase its capacity to sequester and store carbon. You can explore how farmers have turned their baseline assessment into a detailed plan in the case studies for this milestone.
Utilising an ecologist with knowledge of the farming landscape can help you to determine whether your planned interventions are suited to your chosen site. You will want to ensure for example that when planting a wildflower meadow, the species you are choosing are suitable for your climate and will attract beneficial local pollinators.
You will also want to consider how your intended improvements may impact other areas of the farm or the farm business overall. For example, if you are removing grazing animals to restore a degraded peatland, you will need to think about where those animals will be placed instead to ensure they do not cause harm elsewhere. Improving one site to the detriment of another is called ‘leakage’.
On the other hand, creating a woodland on unproductive parts of your farm could improve soil health or provide animal welfare benefits for livestock. Placing your project in the right area can maximise co-benefits and mitigate leakage of environmental harm to elsewhere on the farm.
There may be different parties involved in delivering environmental changes on your farm, depending on your willingness or capacity to conduct the works yourself. Implementing new ways of farming would likely not involve a third party beyond getting advice on suitable practices. If you are planting a woodland or restoring a habitat, however, you may want to bring in additional support from an ecologist or a specialist organisation like the Woodland Trust or Real Wild Estates. Some specialist organisations can also act as a broker to help with identifying and transacting with buyers. Learn more about this process in Milestone 4.
Climate change and other environmental factors will likely pose a threat to many natural habitats in the UK. For instance, increased flooding could affect the forecasted efficacy of natural flood management interventions, and heatwaves could lead to fires and plant die-off in biodiversity improvement areas.
There are ways of incorporating these considerations into ecological modelling and design. Buyers may well ask you about these due to the threat that climate change has on the permanence (see below) of the project’s outcomes. You should be prepared to answer questions about how you are planning for potential climatic impacts on your project and how you plan to mitigate those impacts.
When you are planning for how you will deliver your environmental outcomes, you will also need to undertake a practical risk assessment of the site. The biggest risk is that your interventions will fail, or that external factors will impede the delivery of your outcomes over the agreed period of time.
Examples of these risks could be: unsuitable vegetation chosen for a new woodland, external factors such as fire and storms, or even people destroying established ecological habitats. For example, in peatland restoration this risk of reversal is often highest in the initial two years after implementation when the interventions are still taking root.
With help from an ecological surveyor, you can list all risks to the natural habitat and consider both the likelihood and impact of these risks. You can then begin to make initial plans for how you might mitigate these risks or replace or re-establish your project if it fails.
Tips on handling potential failure are provided in the Planning for Maintenance and Monitoring section within this Milestone, and also discussed in Milestone 6.
Planning for maintenance and monitoring
Before starting to make environmental changes, farmers should have a clear plan for ongoing maintenance and monitoring of the project. The time, labour and costs of these activities should be factored into the plan to ensure farmers are prepared for the ongoing needs of the project.
It is likely that you will be responsible for the ongoing maintenance of your project unless you have an agreement with a third-party project developer to implement and maintain your project. It is important to develop a maintenance plan so you can understand the time commitment and costs expected throughout the life of your project. A maintenance plan may include:
- a statement of the project’s objectives, including in what condition the site should be maintained,
- a statement of the maintenance and management activities to be implemented over the project duration, including identification of necessary resources and inputs,
- references to a risk assessment, including what controls are being put in place to manage these risks,
- a list of all individuals and parties involved in the maintenance and management activities, with their roles clearly stated and why they are best positioned for these roles,
- a chronological plan or estimation of when these activities may be needed, and
- a map of the project area, showing what interventions were originally put in place at the implementation stage.
Monitoring your environmental outcomes is an important piece of post-implementation planning. You may want to conduct monitoring yourself or use a third-party, but you will need to ensure you use a robust methodology and that the costs of monitoring are factored into your budgeting. A formal monitoring plan should be developed in tandem with developing your plan for environmental changes and might include:
- a schedule of how often monitoring activities are undertaken and by whom,
- a statement of the monitoring activities to be implemented, including identification of necessary resources and inputs, such as costs to pay the monitor for their time,
- particular considerations around the risks to the project, such as areas of the site that are more vulnerable to reversal,
- a clear set of outputs to be delivered from each monitoring point, such as fixed point photography or water sampling results,
- a process for recording these outputs and having them reviewed by a relevant project stakeholder, including the buyers, and
- an escalation process in case monitoring shows that the site is not delivering its predicted ecosystem services.
Verifying your ecosystem services is typically done by a third party to ensure accuracy and objectivity. Your buyer may require a specific auditor or, if you are selling your credits through a broker, they may have their own internal auditing process. You will want to ensure that the methodology you use for baselining is consistent with the verification process you are likely to use. If you are uncertain of who your buyer will be, conducting your baseline and verifying your outcomes using a methodology aligned with an existing code or standard will be helpful in demonstrating your outcomes have been achieved. For example, with carbon, using a tool which is GHG Protocol compliant will ensure your measurements are robust and comparable to those taken using other GHG-Protocol-compliant tools.
A formal monitoring plan needs to be developed in tandem with the restoration planning. This might include:
- A schedule of how often monitoring activities are undertaken and by whom.
- A statement of the monitoring activities to be implemented, including identification of necessary resources and inputs, such as costs to pay the monitor for their time.
- Particular considerations around the risks to the project, such as areas of the site that are more vulnerable to reversal.
- A clear set of outputs to be delivered from each monitoring point, such as fixed point photography or water sampling results.
- A process for recording these outputs and having them reviewed by a relevant project stakeholder, including the buyers.
- An escalation process in case monitoring shows that the site is not delivering its predicted ecosystem services.
Ongoing monitoring, maintenance and verification costs can represent a significant portion of your project costs. For example, Spains Hall Estate estimated that 59% of the costs of their BNG interventions were in maintenance and monitoring, with less than half of the costs in initial works. Planning for this now can help you with budgeting and determining whether selling your environmental outcomes will cover the ongoing costs of your project.
Once you have calculated the potential uplift your interventions will likely deliver, you may begin considering what will happen in the event that your project fails either in full or in part to deliver your expected outcomes. Some farmers may use a ‘land buffer’, meaning they ensure they have additional land that has not yet been used in their project which could be utilised to deliver environmental outcomes in the event of a project failure. For instance, if you are planting a woodland on 5 ha, you may want to ensure you have an additional 5ha available for further planting in the event that the woodland does not become established.
Another way of mitigating against these risks is by holding some of the credits you generate back in a buffer pool. This means that out of the credits you generate from soil carbon for example, you keep a portion back from sale which you can then use in the event your project doesn’t deliver the expected outcomes. You may also want to hold back some of the credits to compensate for your own impact or meet supply chain requirements. For example, some farmers who are selling carbon credits hold back enough to compensate for their own emissions so they can demonstrate to their supply chains that they are net zero.
Another example is Spains Hall Estate, which retained 20% of the BNG units it generated. This was partly due to a lack of formal insurance products available to cover the BNG project they implemented and so they decided to take it upon themselves. Some markets for carbon credits also require you to retain some credits as a buffer. Although you may determine the final percentage of credits you’ll retain when you start engaging with buyers, it is important to keep this in mind at the baselining stage so you can factor a buffer into you estimates for potential income from selling credits. Management of risks is also covered in Milestone 6.
