Environmental Philanthropy: Stories to Inspire
Innovating to finance river restoration
Only 14 per cent of rivers in the UK are at ‘good ecological status’ and even this shockingly low figure has been declining over recent years. Very few of our rivers are clean enough to swim in safely, for example. The small amount of philanthropic funding directed towards freshwater conservation overall is helping to slow the decline, but significantly more is needed to reverse it. Our funder collaboration – between the Fishmongers’ Company and the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund – has supported the Rivers Trust and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership to develop a new funding model that has the potential to raise the millions of pounds per annum needed to improve water quality.
The model involves water companies paying to create natural wetlands that purify water. The cost saving for those water companies is potentially enormous: natural water treatment of this sort can cost significantly less than the methods they typically use. The goal is for the water companies to commit a percentage of their savings to a catchment restoration, raising money that can be used to improve the state of our rivers at the scale required. By combining these funds with other sources (such as investment in natural flood management) there is potential for a coherent, catchment-scale approach with multiple benefits.
The Rivers Trust is using their portion of the grant funds to develop this model and prove the concept with Severn Trent Water, Anglian Water, and their respective catchment-based rivers trusts – Severn Rivers Trust and Norfolk Rivers Trust. The aim is to gain government backing at ministerial level with the support of the Environment Agency, with a view to rolling out this model nationally. The Rivers Trust needs significant additional investment to increase its capacity and that of its members to enable the brokering of agreements at a national and local scale respectively, but they’ve already made significant progress with water companies, regulators, government, and potential business partners. If this project is successful, it could mark the beginning of a game-changing way of financing key environmental work – freeing it from the limitations of philanthropic and grant-aided investment, and putting environmental funding on a business footing.
Reconciling the different priorities, constraints and timescales of multiple funders is challenging, but there are great benefits to recipients of receiving multiple grants for the same project, and it gives them greater confidence to act with purpose. This initiative has shown us all that collaboration generates a sense of coherence, clarity of thought and scale that is not possible when individual sources are funding single organisations.