Natural Assurance Schemes (NAS) Canvas And Successful Business Model Examples

Overview

An intervention that is worth doing and cannot be paid for is not going to happen. This part of the guide deals with that gap: how the value a Nature Based Solution creates is captured by someone, how that someone is turned into a payer, and which arrangements have actually worked.

The Natural Assurance Scheme is the project's answer to the structural problem. A conventional infrastructure investment has a payer who receives a service and a revenue stream that can be borrowed against. A Nature Based Solution usually delivers its benefit as avoided loss, spread across many beneficiaries, none of whom is billed. A natural assurance scheme is an arrangement that identifies the beneficiaries, establishes what the risk reduction is worth to them, and constructs a mechanism through which they contribute to it.

Building the business case

Building the business case means answering four questions in a form that survives scrutiny by an investor or a finance ministry. What is the intervention, and what does it deliver, in physical terms? Who benefits, and by how much, in their own terms? Who can be asked to pay, and on what basis can they be obliged or persuaded to? And what is the intervention worth against the alternative, over the period that the funder cares about?

The NAS canvas is the instrument used to answer them together. It is an adaptation of the business model canvas to the case where the value produced is largely a public good, where the return is realised over a long period against an up-front cost, and where the regulatory context determines what can be charged for. It records the flow of services the intervention generates and how their value is captured on both the supply and the demand side, which is what turns a set of benefits into a proposition that can be funded.

Funding and financing options

The work also surveys the instruments themselves. Public funding through national and European programmes, payments for ecosystem services, water utility tariffs, land value capture, green bonds and other labelled debt, blended finance combining public and private capital, and insurance-linked arrangements are all examined for what they require and what they can support. Each has conditions: a revenue stream that can be assigned, a beneficiary who can be identified, a regulatory basis for a charge, or a creditworthy counterparty.

International examples of value capture and funding for nature restoration are compiled and classified, so that a reader can find an arrangement that resembles their own case rather than inventing one. The classification records the mechanism, the parties, the scale and the conditions under which it operated, including the arrangements that failed and why.

What the examples show

The successful cases share features that are not about the ecology. They have a beneficiary who is large enough and organised enough to act, a value that can be measured in that beneficiary's own accounting, and a legal or contractual route to transfer money. Where one of the three is missing, the arrangement collapses regardless of the quality of the intervention. That is the finding the examples are collected to demonstrate.