Study title

Environmental restoration and conservation challenges go beyond what can be financed publicly. There are significant opportunities for private investment in the delivery of public goods, benefitting both commercial organisations whose business relies on ecosystem services, as well as landowners, land managers and the general public. Thus, public-private financing of natural capital improvement presents an opportunity to increase the availability of funding for payments for ecosystem services that provide environmental and societal benefits. Though public-private partnerships for the financing of ecosystem services is in its infancy in the UK. This study explores the voluntary ecosystem services market in the UK. This is achieved by developing an understanding of how key actors (schemes, stakeholder engagement initiatives, trading platforms and supporting modelling tools) operate, and by identifying possible synergies, examples of good practice and challenges to implementation. Topics covered include, understanding how the identified actors account for the social distribution of ecosystem services, how values are attributed to ecosystem services, and the legal obligations linked to ventures’ operation.This project will explore new ways to make dairy systems better for the natural environment and farmers' livelihoods, while maintaining the long-term supply of dairy products at reasonable prices in the face of unpredictable challenges like climate change. We will do this by combining the latest natural, social, biological and veterinary science with industry expertise and experiential farmer knowledge, to devise and test innovations that could increase the resilience and sustainability of dairy farming in a rapidly changing world. THE CHALLENGE The UK alone has the tenth largest dairy sector in the world, producing 14 percent of the EU's milk and representing over two per cent of global milk production. A sustainable dairy industry must improve or maintain...