The setting was inspirational. The meeting very productive. And the Great British summertime? Entirely predictable. The skies opened and the team got thoroughly soaked!

If you're working on a project that needs BNG off-site, your client will want a budget number - and getting that number credibly, quickly, without spending hours on research, isn't always easy.

That’s where our BNG Price Calculator comes in.

We're moving to 48 LNRS zones - Local Nature Recovery Strategies. Think Berkshire. Think the Yorkshire Dales. Bigger, more intuitive than the current system. On the face of it, that sounds like good news for habitat banks - a larger catchment area to trade in, and in some ways it is. But there's a more nuanced picture underneath.

We headed to UKREiiF - and came back energised. The event felt bigger and busier than ever. Inside or outside the venue, the atmosphere was excellent, and from a BNG perspective, two things stood out…

The DEFRA metric - the Excel file your ecologist provides showing your unit requirements - is the standard tool for understanding what biodiversity net gain you need. But it wasn't built for speed, clarity, or cost. That gap is what we set out to fix.

A functioning market iterates and improves over time, and a lot of what's been put forward by the government is good common sense.

Here's what's changing...

We visited Nattergal, one of the UK's most ecologically ambitious habitat banks. It was a day that reinforced exactly why we believe the biodiversity net gain market is heading somewhere genuinely significant…

Key members of the Biodiversity Units UK team will be in Leeds on Wednesday 20 May. We're there to talk units, pricing, supply, and the practicalities of getting BNG sorted without it becoming a blocker on your project.

Following last week’s Government announcements on Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), we wanted to take a moment to digest the detail and share a perspective focused on what this means for the market - particularly for developers and habitat banks.

We've launched the Planners for BNG Directory - England's first public directory of planning consultants who have successfully navigated BNG projects.

On March 25th we hosted our first monthly Lunch & Learn: "How to Buy BNG at the Right Price". Over 120 attendees and the best part was the questions - which were incisive and wide ranging.

We recently helped a client reduce their Biodiversity Net Gain expected costs from £6 million to £4 million. Not by cutting corners or reducing their biodiversity obligations - but by questioning the assumptions in their ecological report and finding more practical solutions within the BNG framework.

Mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain comes into force for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) on May 2026. These projects routinely cross multiple Local Planning Authority boundaries and Natural Character Areas - which creates three clear commercial challenges.

It has become apparent that many people approaching the BNG purchase process for the first time are unclear on what it entails, and the prices they can expect to pay. So we've decided to do something about it - every month.

Since mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain came into force, one thing has become very clear: developers, planning consultants and ecologists have a lot of questions.

Within three days we'd evaluated the metric against BNG legislation and Barnsley Council's requirements, and come back with a range of BNG unit supply options and pricing.

We're now creating Nature Positive awards for clients, sending them a certificate to showcase on site, in head offices, or wherever they choose.  So you can tangibly see what was done and where - on the wall for all to see. 

Timed to launch with the two year anniversary of Biodiversity Net Gain - now includes data from 165 habitat banks. This edition is both updated and expanded.

We wanted to reflect on where the industry had come in the last year - so we canvassed our colleagues across the industry and gathered their perspectives. They make for fantastic reading,

Inclusion of NSIPs is a significant development for nature conservation. It's also beneficial for infrastructure projects themselves, as BNG removes environmental ambiguity through the planning process: a core benefit of the legislation.