Moray Farm Cluster has been awarded £131k from the Scottish Government’s Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) administered by NatureScot.
Concerned about the resilience of their businesses in the face of an uncertain environmental and policy future, the cluster is building on the work of its recent Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) project to investigate the potential to deliver the nature network via payments for ecosystem services.
The nature network – an expanse of nearly 250ha of new and improved habitat and over 60km of new hedgerows and tree avenues – aims to integrate habitat connectivity with farming activities to deliver positive nature and climate outcomes.
The project aligns with the Moray Biodiversity Action Plan and addresses key environmental challenges such as habitat fragmentation, climate vulnerability, and the spread of invasive non-native species (INNS).
Having established monitoring baselines, scoped the ecological viability and refined the design of habitat interventions across 6,600 ha, the cluster is determined to make the delivery of the nature network financially viable for its members.
Most grants are too limited in scope and short-term to deliver for nature at scale. Nature markets are a way for farmers to earn income by providing ecosystem services from their land, like increasing biodiversity, storing carbon, reducing flood risk, or improving water quality.
Farmers are often excluded from nature markets because thier projects are too small, fragmented or expensive to adminster. By working together, the Moray Farm Cluster creates the scale that both nature and its new markets need.
The FIRNS project will quantify the uplift in biodiversity generated by the cluster’s nature network and compile detailed costs for its establishment and long-term maintenance. With that information, we can deduce a price per unit of biodiversity uplift. The cluster will engage with organisations and companies in the area and who might need to buy biodiversity units to comply with the biodiversity enhancement requirements of the National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4). NPF4 requires all major developments to leave biodiversity in a demonstrably better state. The Moray Farm Cluster can support developers of housing or infrastructure to comply with biodiversity enhancement planning conditions by providing new and improved habitat.
To participate in these markets, the cluster needs to formalise itself. The FIRNS project hopes to identify the most appropriate member-owned structure for a farming cluster to leverage its scale.
The project is due to conclude early summer 2026 and we’ll be posting the findings on this website. Check back in soon to read about our progress.
The project is supported by NatureScot in collaboration with the Scottish Government through the Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS).
The wider aims of the project include:
- Establishing formal collaborative relationships between land managers for enhanced habitat management.
- Demonstrating cost-effective delivery of public goods in a productive agricultural landscape by blending public and private finance to deliver at the pace and scale demanded by the biodiversity and climate crises.
- Developing solutions for on-farm climate resilience that can be adopted more widely.
Sylvestris act as project managers and facilitators of the project and secure ongoing funding to support this ambitious project. The goal is to pave the way for other similar groups to follow suit and contribute to nature restoration.
Funding provided by:
