The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust
Registered Charity Number: 1112023
About the Charity
GWCT is a leading UK conservation charity working with farmers directly rather than acquiring its own land to deliver environmental change in hand with food production. GWCT and its subsidiary GWCT NCA are supporting the Environmental Farmers Group to build a sustainable model to deliver bottom-up environmental change on a landscape scale financed through natural capital markets.
What our grant will help to fund
Around the world, countries are realising the fundamental relationship between economic and environmental health. The UK Government has ambitious targets for environmental recovery including Net Zero. Farmers are the custodians of 72% of land in England and so to achieve these ambitions for Society they need to take centre stage in delivery.
Environmental Farmers’ Group (EFG) is a farmer-owned, farmer-led cooperative, organised on a local level, operating in the natural capital sector. This project will look for the first time at scale how farmers are able to access income streams from emerging voluntary nature markets.
The ambition is to deliver a truly sustainable model, balancing social, environmental and economic outcomes where farmers are supported by corporates and businesses to manage land to meet our national environmental targets whilst still delivering food productively.
“GWCT’s focus is developing practical solutions to conservation challenges and we have worked with farmers and land managers for decades, so co-founding and supporting the EFG cooperative is a logical progression. The Movement for Good Award will enable the Trust to help EFG farmers access emerging natural capital markets to finance the landscape-scale conservation needed to restore the UK’s biodiversity and river catchments.”
Digby Sowerby, Operations Officer, The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust
