Monitoring Spend Toward Biodiversity Targets

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Monitoring Spend Toward Biodiversity Targets

Clients: Office for Environmental Protection (OEP)

Year: 2026

eftec team: Ian Dickie, Natalya Kharadi, Frayr Bridgeman

Service Area: Policy Advisory

Location: England

Full reports:

Private sector expenditure and impact of achieving targets are not included in this study

eftec was commissioned by the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) to develop an approach to monitor public expenditure and linking it to the progress toward biodiversity-related goals and targets in the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP23) in England. This is part of a drive to increase Government accountability on credible and transparent investment of public money in nature. The approach can also be used to compare actual and budgeted expenditure with the estimated need for expenditure. Such comparisons help inform discussion on how to close the gap between them.

The project developed a methodological approach and collated publicly available expenditure data to test this approach for measuring contributions to the Environment Act 2021 species abundance targets and overlapping commitments in the EIP23.

The figure above outlines the approach which was populated to create:

A biodiversity expenditure database;
A catalogue of estimated expenditure by EIP23 goals; and
An expenditure tracker that compares estimated biodiversity expenditure to the England Biodiversity Funding indicator.

The technical report finds that public expenditure for biodiversity in England was £7 billion in 2024/25, just over a third of the £20 billion of the estimated need over the same period. The results show synergies in expenditure between EIP23 goals, where spending on one goal often contributes to achieving another.

The expenditure database highlights data gaps and uncertainties in publicly available expenditure reporting, which limits the robustness of comparison of expenditure between and within EIP23 goals. This includes lack of clarity on the flow of money between organisations who fund biodiversity actions and those who implement them, and lack of expenditure evidence on specific areas (e.g., marine and coastal biomes, improving chemical status, and preventing future invasive species impacts).

This project was the first step in establishing a functional approach and structure for the OEP to report expenditure evidence. Alongside the report, eftec produced an Excel workbook with a dynamic structure that supports adding new evidence, updating assumptions, and tracking actual, budgeted, and required biodiversity expenditure over time.