Team
Leah Reinfranck
Leon Seefeld
Vlad Afanasiev
Rosa Brand
Units
Next Economics
Capital Systems
Bioregional Economics
Team
Leah Reinfranck
Leon Seefeld
Vlad Afanasiev
Rosa Brand
Units
Next Economics
Capital Systems
Bioregional Economics
As awareness of the polycrisis grows, more organisations are directing finance towards ecosystem restoration. While this might seem promising, there is significant risk that if funding flows through existing financial mechanisms, it may deepen the commodification and privatisation of nature. The current paradigm of nature finance often requires the reduction of complex ecological and social systems to single metrics, such as tonnes of carbon or biodiversity units, and seldom require the deeper behavioural, cultural or structural changes, such as shifting consumption patterns, that ecological recovery demands. Ignoring the need to recognise humans as inherent parts of the ecosystem will likely lead to continued degradation. How funding is structured, where it goes, and who gets to decide are just as important as the money itself. To do things differently will necessarily require new and re-imagined governance tools, financial mechanisms, multi-stakeholder collaboration, recognising and surfacing multiple values tied to place, bespoke metrics and worldview shifts, just to name a few.
We are working closely with our on-the-ground partner, the Findhorn, Nairn & Lossie Rivers Trust (FNLRT), located in north-east Scotland on the edge of the Moray Firth, to demonstrate that this change is possible. As a place-based environmental conservation intermediary working at a bioregional scale, FNLRT is uniquely positioned to play a coordinating and enabling role in improving local resilience. They work in partnership to deliver practical action to protect and restore rivers, watersheds and wildlife and their flagship programme, the Findhorn Watershed Initiative, aims to restore not only a mosaic of nature-rich habitats, but also to foster a culture of nature connectedness and enable a thriving nature-based local economy.
In 2025, we co-authored a Watershed Finance Strategy with FNLRT to serve as an ethical guide to navigating this complex space and decision making around how private finance could flow differently so that it is in service to the integrated mission of bioregional regeneration. We subsequently recruited a Bioregional Finance Lead, co-employed 50:50 between Dm and FNLRT to help operationalise the strategy. Since, we’ve been busy piloting new approaches, including enabling tools and concepts such as a digital multi-stakeholder governance platform, a framework to surface multi-capital value, bespoke Watershed Credits, and Cornerstone Indicators to understand what works and under what conditions, so that these can be refined and replicated in other places.
Our goal in this partnership is to generate replicable learnings and support FNLRT to expand this place-based systems change across the wider Moray Firth Bioregion to unlock even greater funding to allow for a proportionate response to the crises we face.
