Exploring the potential of Regional Farm and Rural Support Groups to stimulate Green Finance Markets

Natural England are commissioning research to investigate the potential of Regional Farm and Rural Support Groups (RFRSGs), specifically through their role as aggregators, to stimulate Green Finance markets and support key place-based environmental planning initiatives such as LNRS. The objectives of this research are to: 1) Understand the coverage of RFRSGs or similar initiatives across England. 2) Characterise RFRSGs in England (with focus on geographical scale, membership, governance structures, level of engagement with Green Finance and links to local governance arrangements and delivery frameworks) to assess their individual and collective potential to act as a Green Finance aggregators and support place-based environmental planning. 3) Produce a heat-map to visually illustrate the above and identify gaps in national coverage and capacity to engage with Green Finance markets and support place-based environmental planning. 4) Explore and demonstrate the potential of RFRSGs to attract natural capital investment and support its distribution through a series of case studies aimed at exploring RFRSGs state of readiness and capacity to act as aggregators in local emerging ecosystem service markets. 5) Provide a series of recommendations aimed at: a) RFRSGs: to facilitate their engagement with emerging Green Finance markets and highlighting best practice to enable other RFRSGs to follow suite b) Policy makers: to increase awareness of the potential of RFRSGs to support Green Finance policy and direct finance flows to deliver landscape scale environmental goals c) Responsible authorities: to increase awareness of the potential of RFRSGs to support and deliver on integrated place-based environmental planning.