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Frequently asked questions
If you are a landholder or business with a question about our services, or someone who just wants to know more about what we do, the FAQs below may help answer your query.
A Catchment Market (or Environmental Market) is an online marketplace where landholders in a particular catchment can offer to supply nature-based projects on their land and third parties can bid for the rights to the environmental services delivered by these projects.
Nature-based projects are habitat creation, restoration or enhancement projects that deliver environmental services. Examples of these include creating wetlands, planting new woodlands, and the reversion of arable farmland to grassland.
Environmental Services include biodiversity and water quality improvements, natural flood management, carbon sequestration and other outcomes delivered by nature-based projects. Multiple environmental services can be delivered by a single project, for example, a wetland may deliver biodiversity improvements and reduce nitrogen and phosphorus flows into rivers and streams.
Environmental credits are the property rights to a standard quantity of an environmental service deemed to be delivered by a registered nature-based project under a relevant standard, for example, a biodiversity unit delivered by a grassland project and quantified using the statutory biodiversity metric.
The standards used to quantify the environmental services delivered by different types of nature-based projects are approved by the Interim Environmental Markets Board. Environmental credits will be issued by the market operator once it has verified that a project has been delivered to the agreed project specifications.
Project suppliers. These are landholders who are willing to deliver nature-based projects on their land. They can participate within a live market if they are willing to:
Local eligibility criteria may apply. To find out more, please visit the nature market webpage for your area.
Project suppliers participate in the market by making an offer (the minimum payment that they want to receive to deliver the project).
A market operator is an organisation that establishes and operates an environmental market. They:
EnTrade is the market operator for these nature markets.
The types of projects that are eligible may vary for individual markets.
Learn more about the types of projects that are eligible.
The payment you will receive for a nature-based project will depend on the type, scale and location of the project and the duration of the Landowner Agreement.
It will also depend on the Offer you make to supply the project, and whether the amount businesses are willing to pay for the environmental credits from the project is sufficient to match your Offer and cover the Market Operator Fees.
If your offer is matched, you will receive your offer price, plus the bonus for your share of the surplus from the trade.
The payment you will need to make for the environmental credits will depend on the supply of nature-based projects and the offers made by project suppliers.
If your bid is sufficient to match the offers made by project suppliers and the market operator fee, you will pay your bid price minus the discount for your share of the surplus from the trade.
The EnTrade team is available to discuss how your environmental goals could be met through our markets.
This will include us working to understand the level of positive impact that you want to achieve and how this translates into environmental credits.
The amount you bid for credits is entirely up to you and will depend on what you are aiming to achieve and the budget you have available.
Because it is a competitive market, the EnTrade team cannot provide you with specific guidance on how much to bid.
The Market Settlement Reports from previous market rounds and the market opportunities statement published before each market round provide useful information that can be used by buyers before bids are submitted.
View the latest Somerset Catchment reports and Bristol Avon Catchment reports for more information.
There is no minimum credit requirement, and a buyer can register a credit requirement of any quantity.
A bid should be the maximum amount a buyer is willing to pay to meet their credit requirement. A bid can be made as either an amount per credit or the total amount for the full credit requirement.
To be successful in the market a bid will need to exceed the cost per credit of:
Information about the ongoing payments for land use and maintenance and EnTrade’s fees are published in the market opportunities statement for each market round.
A successful buyer will never pay more than their bid.
A buyer may pay less than their bid if there is a surplus from the trades in the market round. Buyers will receive their share of any surplus in the form of a discount on their bid.
Buyers whose bids are too low to meet supplier payments, EnTrade fees and other costs will be unsuccessful in the market round.
Once the market round is complete, each unsuccessful market participant will receive a report that shows how their bid or offer compares to successful bids and offers.
The EnTrade team cannot provide information about the amount a Buyer may choose to bid.