The problem
Flooding, drought, pollution, poor water quality and ecological degradation are no longer separate environmental issues. They are shared risks affecting communities, farms, water companies, local authorities, rail, roads, energy networks, housing providers and landowners.
Yet the institutions responsible for managing these risks usually work separately. Each organisation has its own duties, budgets, appraisal methods, risk models and investment cycles. As a result, nature-based and catchment-scale interventions are often treated as nice-to-have environmental projects rather than serious shared infrastructure.
This creates a major delivery gap. Interventions such as wetlands, natural flood management, soil improvement, woodland creation, peatland restoration, sustainable drainage and river restoration can reduce multiple risks at once. But they are hard to scale when no one has a clear method for deciding who should pay, who benefits, who governs delivery, and how long-term performance will be maintained.
Why current approaches fall short
Current nature-market and project-funding models often assume that environmental benefits can be converted into standardised credits or specified contracted outcomes and sold to buyers. That may work in some contexts, but it is a poor fit for many water and infrastructure challenges. It is based on mainstream economic thinking rather than drawing on wider economic thinking that addresses the real challenges.
Water outcomes are place-specific and emergent properties of complex systems. Reducing flood risk, sewer overflow pressure, drought vulnerability or infrastructure disruption depends on what happens in particular parts of a catchment. A wetland, woodland or soil intervention in the wrong location may have little value for the asset or community at risk.
The challenge is therefore not simply to create more credits. It is to build the institutional plumbing that allows those who depend on a functioning landscape to identify shared risks, agree priorities, pool resources, fund interventions, verify outcomes and adapt over time.
See this blog published by Green Alliance in 2025.
Our approach
We develop collaborative models for catchment and landscape resilience. We focus on the economic and institutional design needed to move from fragmented projects to shared investment and long-term stewardship – see this report on developing collaborative approaches.
Our work brings together ecological economics, practical governance design, value allocation, stakeholder facilitation and applied policy thinking. We help partners move from the question ‘what projects could we do?’ to the harder question ‘what shared institution, rules and investment logic would allow us to deliver and maintain these projects over time?’
We are particularly interested in models such as buyers’ clubs and catchment-scale member governed clubs. These approaches enable organisations with overlapping risks to collaborate without pretending they all have identical motivations or identical benefits.
See this explainer commissioned by the University of Oxford lead TABLE organisation on the differencees between environmental and ecological economics.
