Nature Restoration Fund: interim evaluation

Executive summary

This interim evaluation assesses the impact of the Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) from 2021 to 2024, examining its role in achieving nature recovery across Scotland.

The Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) is an unprecedented commitment from the Scottish Government to invest £65 million in nature recovery over a five-year period (April 2021 to March 2026). The NRF provides a key delivery mechanism for Scottish Government to deliver outcomes of the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy (SBS) and achieve its vision to be Nature Positive by 2030 and restore and regenerate biodiversity by 2045.^[1]

This evaluation had the following key objectives:

• Analyse the outputs and contributions of projects funded under the NRF’s two strands, the Competitive Fund and Edinburgh Process.
• Incorporate qualitative insights from case studies.
• Identify key challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities.
• Draw conclusions on the NRF’s impact during the funding period 2021-2024.

As of March 2024, the NRF has invested £35.5 million, supporting nearly 800 projects to promote nature recovery in over 309,000 hectares^[2], driving large scale action across Scotland. The NRF has successfully enabled a wide range of nature restoration projects to be delivered, including woodland creation, species-rich grassland management, riparian habitat restoration, and large-scale invasive non-native species (INNS) control. This report summarises its achievements and provides recommendations to address delivery challenges, enhance future evaluations and drive strategic alignment between the two funding strands.

Key findings

The NRF has been instrumental in accelerating nature restoration and supporting vulnerable species and habitats, aligning with key outcomes of the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy. The NRF is administered through two funding strands:

1. The Competitive Fund strand is administered by NatureScot via a competitive application process. This evaluation has found that the Competitive Fund has broadened participation in nature restoration, providing funding to a wide range of organisations, from NGOs to private landowners, for targeted conservation efforts.

2. The Edinburgh Process strand is administered by the Scottish Government and allocates a portion of NRF funding each year to local authorities, providing a means for local authorities to collaborate with stakeholders to design and implement nature restoration from the bottom-up. This evaluation has found that the Edinburgh Process strand has enhanced local authority engagement in nature restoration, furthering collaboration to integrate nature restoration initiatives into local planning and delivery.

The following list presents key measures of progress delivered by the Competitive Fund and Edinburgh Process strands against the target outputs and outcomes of the NRF (April 2021-March 2024). These findings draw from analysis of project funding data and information gathered from key NRF stakeholders including Scottish Government, NatureScot and project leads. Some figures are based on incomplete data and should be treated with caution and as estimates. Please refer to the main report for commentary on data limitations and caveats.

NRF outputs and contribution to outcomes

Number of projects established for nature restoration:

• Competitive Fund strand: 452 applications received; 222 applications funded
• Edinburgh Process strand: At least 575 projects supported (2022-24)

Diversity of organisations and landowners engaging with nature restoration through the NRF:

• Competitive Fund strand: Proportion of successful applicants receiving NatureScot funding for the first time increased over the 3 years
• Edinburgh Process strand: 74% of projects included partnerships and/or community groups, often involving collaborations in delivery

Extent of NRF funding awarded:

• Competitive Fund strand: £16.2 million received by projects as of 31 March 2024
• Edinburgh Process strand: £19.3 million received by local authorities as of 31 March 2024

Area (hectares) where project activities have been undertaken:

• Competitive Fund strand: 114,000 hectares (including large scale INNS removal projects); 7,800 hectares (excluding large scale INNS removal projects)
• Edinburgh Process strand: Over 195,106 hectares (including large scale INNS removal projects); Over 7,447 hectares (excluding large scale INNS removal projects)

Extent of woodland and hedgerow restoration:

• Competitive Fund strand: Over 194,600 trees planted; 68.3 km of hedgerows created
• Edinburgh Process strand: 134,213 trees planted

Action on habitat for pollinators:

• Competitive Fund strand: More than 282 ha of habitat for pollinators restored or created
• Edinburgh Process strand: 149 projects including meadow creation, relaxed mowing, wildflower plugs, removal of INNS, thinning of woodlands, solitary bee nests

Habitat creation for priority species:

• Competitive Fund strand: 22 different targeted actions to protect priority species
• Edinburgh Process strand: Not measured for Edinburgh Process

Natural flood management measures:

• Competitive Fund strand: 314 ha of wetlands created or restored; 300 ponds and scrapes created; 4.4 km of watercourses re-meandered; 5.1 km of backwater reconnected
• Edinburgh Process strand: 55 projects including river and wetland reconnection, pond creation, woody debris installation

Freshwater and riparian habitat restoration:

• Competitive Fund strand: over 13,000 trees planted along watercourses; 19 km of aquatic and riparian habitat restored; 7 man-made obstructions removed from watercourses
• Edinburgh Process strand: 71 projects including river and wetland reconnection

Urban habitat connectivity and nature-based solutions for communities:

• Competitive Fund strand: 1,818 ha of urban greenspace restored in towns and cities
• Edinburgh Process strand: 145 projects including Nature Networks, connecting urban and rural greenspaces, removal of physical barriers, greening active travel routes

Managing invasive species in catchments:

• Competitive Fund strand: 103,436 ha protected and restored from INNS; 216 km of linear habitat protected from INNS
• Edinburgh Process strand: 70 projects which included herbicide spraying, stump removal, natural regeneration

Enhancing and restoring marine habitats and environments:

• Competitive Fund strand: 23 mini buoys deployed; 1 seagrass nursery established; 40,000 transplants produced to support saltmarsh restoration
• Edinburgh Process strand: 57 projects including native vegetation plating, INNS control, seagrass and oyster habitat surveys

Case study insights

Interviews with project leads, local authority representatives, and NatureScot topic leads provided critical qualitative evidence on the NRF’s impact:

• The fund has enabled projects that would not have been possible through other funding sources, filling a critical gap in Scotland’s nature conservation funding landscape.
• Challenges identified include weather, difficulties sourcing equipment or materials (particularly during the Covid pandemic), administrative burdens (including short timeframes and securing planning permissions), and difficulties in accessing skilled contractors. If these challenges are addressed where possible, it may boost the effectiveness of project delivery.
• Several project leads reflected that, while nature restoration work was new to the contractors who worked on their project, this experience upskilled them, actively building the skill base across Scotland.

Key challenges and opportunities

Through this evaluation, the evaluation team have identified several challenges and opportunities to optimise the success of the NRF.

Improving reporting and data collection

• The Competitive Fund and Edinburgh Process are administered separately, leading to differences in data collection and reporting. These differences hindered the ability to evaluate the NRF’s impact across strands. Aligning reporting frameworks would enhance comparability and strategic coordination.
• The introduction of a unified reporting framework could help standardise reporting both between strands and between different projects. To acknowledge the complexities of nature restoration and allow for the diversity of activities to be captured such a system should report broad-scale outcomes and more project-specific impacts.

Strengthening Nature Networks

• Nature Networks are a priority for Scottish biodiversity policy and current NRF metrics could be improved to better capture impacts on ecological connectivity.
• The Nature Network Toolbox provided to local authorities will help target restoration actions in the Edinburgh Process^[3]. Making a suitable mapping tool and relevant datasets more accessible to the public would enable actions under the Competitive Fund to be better targeted.

Future evaluations and comparative analysis

• Comparing and collating data from different nature restoration projects and initiatives is inherently complex, given variations in project type, geographical location, scale, and cost. Future evaluations should consider cost variations, geographic challenges, and project complexity when assessing data across different funding streams.

Initial conclusions on the NRF’s impact (2021-2024)

Importance of multi-year funding

• With 36 multi-year projects still ongoing as of 31 March 2024, it was not feasible to directly compare single and multi-year projects. However, data analyses and evidence from case studies provide indication that multi-year funding facilitated more ambitious projects such as re-meandering rivers, floodplain creation, and landscape-scale nature restoration.
• A key challenge identified in the Edinburgh Process strand was the short turnaround time between receiving funding and project delivery, a challenge compounded by local authority procurement processes. Greater flexibility in transferring funding between financial years would help overcome this challenge.
• Maintaining and enhancing long-term funding stability will enable multi-year projects, build long-term collaborations and ensure lasting ecological benefits.

Flexibility and innovation

The NRF has demonstrated a unique level of flexibility, allowing projects to propose diverse and innovative solutions tailored to local conservation needs. The NRF is uniquely placed to support:

• Multi-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together landowners, NGOs, and researchers.
• Nature restoration techniques requiring new and innovative approaches, such as marine and coastal restoration.
• Capital investments (e.g. monitoring equipment, habitat management tools).

Driving collaboration and leveraging investment

• Registered charities and trusts made up the largest proportion of successful applications to the Competitive Fund (63%). Despite this, the evaluation indicated that the NRF has had an increasingly diverse pool of applicants year on year. There is, however, evidence that some groups still face barriers being either under-represented (e.g. community groups) or have a lower success rate (e.g. partnerships/consortiums).
• These findings suggest that organisations accustomed to grant writing, such as charities/trusts and public bodies, are more likely to succeed. This may point to a need for additional support or training in grant-writing. Organisations such as the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations^[4] and TSI Scotland Network have the potential to provide such support.^[5]
• The Competitive Fund’s Development Phase Projects have been crucial in helping applicants form partnerships and scale up their efforts.
• Between 2021-2024, the NRF unlocked at least £7.1 million in match funding and in-kind contributions, demonstrating its role in leveraging additional investment and expertise for nature recovery. The NRF should continue to focus on opportunities for blended finance and attracting match funding, contributing to crowding in private finance to supplement public funding on nature restoration.
• The NRF directly allocated an additional £5 million to local authorities specifically to expand work on Nature Networks in 2023/24. Across 2021-2024, 21 local authorities reported that they had identified opportunity areas for creating or enhancing Nature Networks and 16 started to develop projects targeting these areas.
• The Edinburgh Process strand (and conversations around Nature Networks in particular) has enabled cross-departmental collaboration within local authorities, integrating nature restoration into areas such as flood risk management, urban planning, and forestry.

The NRF’s role in achieving Scotland’s nature recovery goals

• The fund remains a vital mechanism for facilitating biodiversity recovery, enhancing ecosystem resilience, and improving environmental sustainability.
• In supporting nature-based solutions, the habitats created, restored and enhanced support policies and national targets beyond nature recovery, helping Scotland adapt to and mitigate against climate change and move towards a greener and more sustainable future.
• It is recognised that this is an interim evaluation and projects commencing in 2024/25 and 2025/26 were not in scope. Also, some NRF projects included in this evaluation continued beyond 31 March 2024. Therefore, the full impact of NRF funding will continue to unfold over the coming years.
• With lack of contractors identified as a key challenge, the NRF also provides an opportunity to increase practical conservation skills and boost green jobs across Scotland.

The NRF is a transformative funding mechanism, supporting a wide range of nature restoration projects that contribute to Scotland’s biodiversity and climate resilience goals. Its flexibility, collaborative approach, and capacity to attract match funding set it apart from other conservation funding streams. This evaluation has identified several challenges which, if addressed, would boost the impact of the NRF. Measures to address challenges included improving consistency of data used in reporting, increasing alignment between the two strands, and securing sustained financial investment.

While ongoing projects are still unfolding, initial findings underscore the critical role of the NRF in Scotland’s nature recovery strategy. Ensuring the continued stability and enhancement of the NRF will be essential for achieving long-term environmental sustainability and meeting Scotland’s biodiversity commitments by 2045.