Robert Gardner, CEO and Co-Founder, Rebalance Earth
Rebalance Earth has invested in Great Yellow to close the structural gap between large-scale nature recovery and institutional capital.
The partnership brings together what has long been missing from UK nature recovery: on-the-ground expertise working directly with farmers and landscapes, connected to the utilities, infrastructure operators and corporates that pay for flood mitigation and water quality outcomes, backed by the institutional capital required to finance delivery at scale.
Great Yellow, alongside its sister company Swallowtail, are already supporting multiple Defra-supported Landscape Recovery projects across England. Their current portfolio spans over 300,000 hectares, with additional catchments under development.
The partnership with Rebalance Earth will scale this momentum into a repeatable, farmer-led model for catchment resilience that works for nature, investors and the UK economy.
Demand from corporates, utilities, developers, insurers and public bodies drives the adoption of outcome-based contracts. Those contracts create predictable cashflows. Predictable cashflows attract institutional capital. Institutional capital funds landscape recovery at scale.
As delivery scales, risk falls. As risk falls, capital grows. As capital grows, nature restoration accelerates.
A shared belief: nature is national infrastructure
The UK’s rivers, floodplains, soils and coastlines are not simply environmental assets; they are functional components of national infrastructure.
The UK is the most flood-exposed economy in the G8. One in four English properties could face flood risk within 25 years. Nature degradation has been identified as a material financial risk by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Defra has called directly for greater private capital investment in flood resilience.
The UK has lost more of its nature than almost any comparable country. Restoring it through regenerative land use, working with farmers, landscapes and natural systems, is both an economic strategy and an ecological necessity.
For the first time, the policy framework, land management capability, regulatory drivers and capital alignment exist to deliver this at scale.
Closing the structural gap
UK nature recovery has historically been fragmented. Delivery has sat with farmers and local partnerships, while capital has sat elsewhere. The bridge between the two has been missing.
Great Yellow and Rebalance Earth close that gap from both directions.
Great Yellow works directly with farmers and land managers across whole catchments, designing and helping to deliver landscape-scale regenerative land-use projects that generate measurable outcomes: reduced flood risk, improved water quality, thriving habitats, resilient soils and sustainable food production. It secures routes to market for environmental outcomes, connecting land managers directly to long-term sources of capital.
“Delivering regenerative land use that is investable at scale is essential if we are to restore landscapes at the pace the UK now demands. Our partnership with Rebalance Earth connects high-integrity, on-the-ground delivery with the capital structures needed to support it. Together, we are building the mechanisms that can move nature recovery from fragmented, project-by-project interventions to a coherent, system-wide model of regeneration.”
Ed Dick, CEO and Co-Founder, Great Yellow
Rebalance Earth closes the gap from the capital side. Backed by West Yorkshire Pension Fund, it aggregates demand from utilities, developers, corporates and public bodies, structuring long-term, outcome-based contracts that generate infrastructure-grade cashflows for institutional investors.
Revenue is generated through three principal, policy-anchored mechanisms:
- Long-term contracted payments for flood mitigation and water quality.
- Statutory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) units.
- High-integrity UK carbon credits.
Together, these diversified revenue streams generate investible, infrastructure-like cash flows that can attract pension and long-term institutional capital.
The result is a shift from subsidised conservation to privately financed natural infrastructure, a system that works for companies, investors, farmers and the communities that depend on functioning ecosystems.
“The UK has already shown it can scale new infrastructure when capital and delivery align. Renewable energy is proof. Nature recovery is next. With Great Yellow, we are building the first vertically integrated system for regenerative land use in the UK, from ‘source to sea’ with the institutional backing to take it national. Our ambition is clear: mobilise £1 billion into UK catchments within three years and scale to £10 billion over the next decade, positioning nature as a mainstream UK infrastructure asset class and unlocking the capital required to restore the country at scale.”
