SDGs 8 Decent work and economic growth

The Challenge

For farmers and others committed to transforming our food systems, the term regenerative agriculture (Regen Ag) has become a unifying concept and one which has enabled a wider community of producers, retailers, financers and others to embrace an agenda of change. But how confident are we in regenerative agriculture’s environmental and productivity claims? And what would a regenerative shift in UK agriculture mean for our food system as a whole?

This Sprint aimed to clarify if and how Regen Ag can lead to greater alignment between land and environmental goals on the one hand, and food and nutrition security on the other, while identifying what policies would enable a just transition for the sector and for those it supplies.

The Solutions

This Sprint found that Regen Ag’s flexibility can empower farmers, foster innovation, and build resilience, but also creates governance and labelling challenges. Realising its benefits requires supply chain reform, supportive policy, transparent standards, improved assessment approaches, and cross-sector collaboration.

Findings indicate that Regen Ag’s value lies less in prescribing specific practices and more in strengthening the capacity of farming systems to balance trade-offs and respond to complex sustainability goals. Extensive stakeholder engagement—including surveys, interviews, and workshops involving actors across policy, industry, and civil society—highlighted the need for context-rich, inclusive decision-support tools covering environmental, social, and economic dimensions of farm systems. Supply chains require longer, flexible contracts that share risk, investment in new farm skills and equipment, improved data for decision-making, and peer-led knowledge networks. Policy should expand independent advisory services, support low-input and mixed farming research, strengthen local market infrastructure, regulate supply chain practices, and align food system transformation with health and sustainability goals.

The Sprint has also helped reframe debates on regenerative agriculture by shifting attention from farming practices alone to wider questions of governance, power, and food system transformation. It contributed to national policy discussions and aligned with key policy developments, including DEFRA’s evolving farming agenda and broader climate policy priorities.

The Pathway

The Regen Ag Sprint co-authored its key outputs with partners, The Food Foundation and the Green Alliance, who have played a central role in disseminating findings to policy and industry audiences. The project engaged a large and diverse stakeholder network—including government, private sector, and civil society organisations—which continues beyond the Sprint and is expected to support ongoing uptake and impact.

Targeted engagement also brought in perspectives from groups often underrepresented in food system debates, including those experiencing food insecurity, shaping the Sprint’s focus on equity and justice. The findings are already informing discussions among policymakers, practitioners, and industry actors, and are likely to be taken forward through continued collaboration and follow-on work.

What happened next

Following the end of the Sprint, the research team was invited to submit expert commentary on Regen Ag’s role in reducing fertiliser dependency in light of global supply shocks (e.g. disruptions linked to the Strait of Hormuz), further demonstrating the timeliness and policy relevance of the research.

the challenge

Finance is a major driver of biodiversity loss. It also has the potential to be a powerful lever for delivering nature-positive outcomes.

However, a significant nature-finance gap remains. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework highlights the need to reduce harmful subsidies, improve how financial institutions account for their impacts on nature, and increase investment in nature recovery.

Achieving this requires both “greening finance” and “financing green”. Yet there is limited evidence on how these approaches can be implemented effectively in practice.

This creates a challenge for policymakers, including Defra. There is a need for clear, actionable insights to align UK financial flows with biodiversity goals and international commitments.

At the same time, the policy landscape is evolving rapidly. New mechanisms, such as the proposed Nature Restoration Fund, signal a shift towards more strategic, landscape-scale approaches. While this creates opportunities, it also introduces risks. Poor design or implementation could lead to unintended consequences and undermine biodiversity outcomes.

The challenge for the Sprint was therefore to generate policy-relevant evidence on how to reduce the biodiversity impacts of financial flows, mobilise private investment, and ensure that interventions work together coherently at scale.

the solutions

The Sprint delivered a set of integrated tools and insights to support policymakers in aligning financial systems with biodiversity outcomes. By combining detailed data analysis with stakeholder engagement and policy design, the team delivered the following:

A granular methodology to quantify biodiversity impacts of financial flows, linking investments from UK banks to ecosystem vulnerabilities across regions and supply chains.

A high-resolution dataset using financial data from six UK banks to support targeted regulatory interventions under the “greening finance” agenda.

The world’s largest database of nature restoration funds, providing new evidence on how such mechanisms operate globally.

Empirical insights into nature markets, including incentive structures, governance models, and cost dynamics.

Practical recommendations to help inform the implementation of the UK’s Nature Restoration Fund, including approaches to metrics, risk-sharing, and alignment with Local Nature Recovery Strategies.

Together, these outputs provided clearer and actionable evidence for how financial and policy interventions can be designed and implemented in practice.

The work also showed that UK financial flows contribute to biodiversity loss internationally, highlighting the need for coordinated regulation, improved disclosure, and stronger policy alignment. It identified trade-offs within emerging biodiversity markets, demonstrating that effective design must balance inclusivity with strategic coordination at scale.

the pathway

The Sprint followed an interdisciplinary pathway designed to connect analytical rigour with real-world policy application. It combined quantitative modelling with qualitative and participatory approaches to ensure outputs were both robust and usable.

The work began with high-resolution financial data, including loans, bonds, and equity investments. These were combined with ecosystem service vulnerability models to identify how financial flows interact with biodiversity risks. This provided a strong evidence base for understanding nature-related dependencies within financial systems.

Building on this, the Sprint examined how nature-positive finance could be scaled. This included mapping incentives, costs, and governance structures within emerging nature markets. Stakeholder engagement in Oxfordshire and analysis of international restoration funds ensured that insights were grounded in practice.

These findings were then applied to live policy development. In particular, they have helped to shape plans for the implementation of the UK’s proposed Nature Restoration Fund.

Finally, participatory scenario workshops brought together stakeholders to explore how different policy and financial interventions could work in combination. This helped identify coherent, landscape-scale approaches to delivering biodiversity outcomes.

This pathway ensured that evidence generation, stakeholder engagement, and policy design were closely integrated throughout.

what happened next?

Following the Sprint, one member of the team is now part of the Nature Restoration Fund’s scientific advisory team. Engagement with local finance market stakeholders through another Sprint member’s DPhil linked with the Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership aims to inform a more equity-centric framework for collaborative and strategic nature recovery. While international uptake remains dependent on wider geopolitical factors, the Sprint has established a strong foundation for future progress. The approach has clear potential to inform biodiversity finance policy in other national contexts as similar frameworks are developed.

SDG: 8 Decent work and economic growth