The Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers group, or the ‘Pioneers’, is a community of practice bringing together anyone with an interest in nature finance, with the aim of developing new avenues for directing investment into nature projects and creating a high-integrity nature finance market in Scotland.
There are currently over 550 individuals involved in the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers Basecamp platform, an open and collaborative working space for the group bringing together a mix of expert advisors, those delivering nature-based solutions and those enabling market infrastructure.

If you are interested in joining this group, please complete this short form, and we will be in touch with further details.
Or if you’d like to find out more contact Julia Clough, Project Development Officer for the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital – jclough@scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk
You can also follow us on LinkedIn
More about Basecamp
Basecamp is a well supported technology platform for that provides the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers network a nexus for sharing data, expertise and events. It supports collaborative working and maintaining a purposeful organisation of decentralised activities that, through the transparency of the platform, enables effective market making developments, reducing the occurrences of duplicated efforts and providing a sounding board for project initiatives. It can be viewed as a convening space for people working across organisational siloes.
Basecamp can be accessed via a web browser (i.e. by logging into their website), downloading and installing the desktop app, and/or downloading and installing their mobile app. Our Basecamp “project/group” is hosted by the Scottish Wildlife Trust in its capacity as provider of the Secretariat for the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital.
When you sign up to the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers and their Basecamp platform, you need to acknowledge the following:
- Scottish Wildlife Trust privacy notice will also apply to any data you provide https://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/privacy-notice/
- Your data is held and processed by Basecamp and subject to their privacy policy https://basecamp.com/about/policies/privacy
- We won’t extract your data for the purpose of emailing you outside of Basecamp, unless we need to notify you specifically about your Basecamp account, your Pioneers membership status, or a particularly important/relevant event being organised by the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers secretariat / leadership group.
- The email address you use to register with Basecamp will be visible to other people that have registered on this platform.
- We can remove you from the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers Basecamp teams or projects. If this is required, please ping an administrator.
Terms of engagement
- Members are encouraged to share ideas and information but must engage in the basecamp in an open and respectful way, respecting the commercial interests of other members and the aims and objectives of the organisations present
- The group encourages constructive challenge to help evolve the nature finance market – but challenge must be respectful and well intentioned
- The Basecamp groups are separated by topic, currently nature finance, land management, marine natural capital and nature tech (launching soon). Please try to place your post on the most relevant topic site(s).
Our history
Established in July 2020, and formerly known as the Scottish Conservation Finance Pioneers, the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers group emerged out of an earlier Scottish Forum sub-group, the Innovative Finance Working Group, which played an important role in driving the “Route Map to £1 Billion” conservation finance project, which launched in May 2020, and was led by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and SEPA. The Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers group aims to build on the interest generated in conservation finance by the Route Map, and is open to anyone to join, from anywhere in the world.
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Hosted by the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital, the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers was founded by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, SEPA, NatureScot, Scottish Forestry and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), with direct funding support from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and strategic partnership arrangements with the Green Finance Initiative and Ecosystems Knowledge Network.
