Flow Country Green Finance Initiative – first steps and consultations
Members of the Flow Country partnership are at the early stages of creating a Green Finance Initiative. This initiative is specifically looking at ways the peatlands can provide financial benefits to local communities.
Flow Country, Caithness, Scotland (photo from the Highland Council)
About the Flow Country?
The Flow Country is a vast expanse of blanket bog in the North of Scotland. Blanket bog is a rare type of peatland which forms only in cool places with plenty of rain and covers the landscape like a blanket. Peatlands can be beneficial to people as well as wildlife. It also plays a vital role in the defence against the effects of climate change.
The Flows’ blanket bog stores 400 million tonnes of carbon, but this remarkable ability to store carbon is only possible if the bogs are kept in healthy condition. The carbon and wider biodiversity potential of the Flows is valuable – and interest in investing in environmentally friendly projects (‘green finance’) and carbon/biodiversity credits is growing.
Green Finance Initiative
In response to the growth in local and external interest in peatland restoration, biodiversity, and carbon credits, a group of local organisations has come together to think through how to put together a Green Finance Initiative (GFI) for the Flow Country.
The Flow Country GFI aims to address these concerns and to work out a model of financial return from our peatlands that would offer clear pathways to benefit local communities, as well as enable us to tackle the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis.
For example, by working together to develop a cohesive community approach to peatland restoration projects, The GFI believes it can:
- get a higher price for carbon credits
- develop clear ethical finance rules
- reduce the admin burden for projects
- promote skills development and local jobs
- and ensure a percentage of the profits goes back to locally beneficial projects.
The GFI brings together representatives from the North Highland Initiative, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Highland Council, RSPB Scotland, University of Highlands and Islands, NatureScot, Caithness Voluntary Group, VisitScotland and the Landscape Finance Lab to brainstorm ideas.
