Nature Pays: Enabling Catchments to Catch Investment
How might we turn catchment-based solutions into investment opportunities that businesses actively choose to support and fund?
Despite growing recognition of the importance of catchment-based solutions, there remains a significant gap between environmental ambition and private sector investment into catchments. Historically, catchment delivery has been heavily reliant on public funding and grants, which are becoming increasingly constrained and difficult to access. While many businesses are supportive in principle, they often struggle to see clear commercial, regulatory or reputational value that justifies involvement and investment. As a result, high-impact opportunities fail to scale. The challenge is to align catchment-based solutions and investment opportunities with business drivers, transforming them into investable, financially viable propositions that attract sustainable private sector funding.
In this Daily Dash, we will get under the skin of what really drives and blocks private sector involvement and investment in catchment-based solutions.
Hearing directly from businesses, we’ll explore what influences their decisions and why many opportunities don’t secure their support or funding. Through interactive discussion and hands-on exercises, we’ll test assumptions, identify the key barriers, and unpack what would make organisations more likely to invest. By the end of the session, we’ll turn insight into action, capturing clear, practical steps to help shape future projects into credible, investable propositions.
- Participants will collaborate through a mix of interactive workshop activities, facilitated discussions and real-world business insights to explore how private sector investment in catchment-based solutions can be unlocked.
- Working together, participants will:
- Hear directly from businesses to understand what drives and shapes investment decisions.
- Explore the key commercial, regulatory and reputational factors influencing engagement.
- Identify the main barriers preventing investment in catchment-based solutions.
- Test ideas on how projects could better align with business priorities.
- Co-create practical actions and next steps to inform future approaches.
- By the end of the session, we will capture a clear set of insights and an action-focused plan that the Wear Catchment Partnership can take forward to support future private sector investment.
We will uncover what makes businesses say yes or no, to investing in catchments, and turn those insights into a practical action plan.
By the end, we’ll have a clear route to making catchment-based solutions genuinely investable.
This Daily Dash is for anyone passionate about the environment and interested in unlocking new ways to fund catchment-based solutions - from local businesses and investors to environmental agencies and catchment partnerships.
It’s an opportunity to collaborate, share perspectives and shape practical approaches to attracting private sector investment
Any questions: contact Louise Patterson: louise.patterson@nwl.co.uk
or Karen Stewart: karen.stewart@wear-rivers-trust.org.uk