The finance will facilitate a significant step for the organisation as RESTORE scales from an embedded rewilding consultancy to a comprehensive nature restoration business, designing and delivering bespoke 100-year natural capital products. With this transformation, it aims to help clients to accelerate their land transitions and ultimately provide more protection for nature across the UK.

Founded in 2023, RESTORE works with landowners, farmers and NGOs to offer vision reports, ecological surveys, land management, natural capital deals and wider professional services. It aims to help landowners understand the current state and potential of their land to create benefit for both the owner and environment. Its work covers the whole of the UK, with projects ranging from the country's first dedicated breeding facility for native invertebrates in Devon through to creating flagship rewilding projects in Bedfordshire.

Founding director of RESTORE, Benedict Macdonald, said: “Managing a fast-growing land portfolio of over 70,000 acres is hugely exciting, but does have its challenges. The key challenge RESTORE faced in 2024 was ensuring we had the surety of natural capital offerings to turn our vision for land into reality: providing certainty for our clients as they transition towards ambitious rewilding schemes. The need to develop natural capital infrastructure was key, and designing natural capital products requires the very best strategic brains. And that, as always, comes down to securing the best talent in an exciting but competitive new sector.

“The partnership with Triodos allows us to scale and upstaff whilst not becoming a standard consultancy that chases the next contract. It allows us to retain our ambition and focus upon key, large-acreage projects across the UK, which we are increasingly securing through a four-layered approach of vision, managed rewilding, ecological science and natural capital delivery. Triodos Bank is a natural partner, aligned to the very ambitious ecological standards that RESTORE seeks to deliver.”

One of Europe’s leading sustainable banks, Triodos has pioneered the financing of nature-based solutions across the last decade. In 2024, the bank announced its commitment to provide at least €500 million in investments, loans and contributions to the nature-based solutions sector by the end of 2030.

Jess Edwards, relationship manager for nature, food and resource at Triodos Bank UK, added: “As a bank that recognises the critical importance of restoring our natural environment and mitigating the effects of the climate crisis, we’ve been proud to be at the forefront of financing nature-based solutions projects in the UK for a number of years.

“However, it’s also important to us that this fast-growing sector has the professional services capacity and infrastructure to continue on this trajectory, which is why we’re so pleased to support RESTORE in its growth plans. RESTORE has a team of dedicated and experienced professionals and ambitious plans in the nature space. We know that by backing businesses like RESTORE to scale, we’re helping the whole sector to develop and evolve.”

RESTORE has made a series of strategic hires, including the recent appointment of commercial and natural capital director, Gil Martin. Gil is a highly regarded natural capital pioneer, having played a key role in the Belmont Estate rewilding and education project. The project, based close to Bristol, has drawn a lot of attention as a case study in successfully selling high-integrity Biodiversity Net Gain units. 

Gil Martin commented: “Natural capital is the by-product of ecological ambition, and this is why RESTORE’s infinitely scalable model for nature restoration is so exciting. We are planning for our first natural capital products to launch over the coming months.”

Benedict Macdonald concluded: “With hires including a pioneering new ecology director and natural capital field leader, we have been able not only to devise enterprising ways to restore sites faster than before but develop a start to end natural capital delivery scheme that gives all sides confidence.”

-Ends-

Notes to editors:

For further information and photography please contact:
Ellie James
T: 0117 311 0241
[email protected]

About Triodos Bank  

Founded in 1980, Triodos Bank has become a frontrunner in sustainable banking globally. As an independent bank that promotes responsible and transparent banking, it does not see any conflict between a focus on people and the planet and a good financial return. Instead it believes that they reinforce each other in the long-term.   

Triodos Bank has banking activities in the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Spain and Germany as well as Investment Management activities based in the Netherlands but active globally. Triodos Bank co-founded the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV), a network of sustainable banks. Together these banks want to grow sustainable banking and its impact on the real economy substantially.  

About RESTORE

RESTORE’s team help landowners create landscapes that teem with life. We combine cutting-edge ecological restoration and nature-friendly farming expertise with financial support to make nature restoration truly viable. RESTORE offers the full range of services for landowners to profitably return nature to their land. From 20-year vision reports to baseline surveys, land management, natural capital deals and species reintroduction, our business is designed to help landowners scale nature recovery across the UK. RESTORE acts as the ecological restoration manager for some of Britain’s most ambitious nature restoration projects. Whether nature-friendly farming or rewilding upland valleys, working with local people lies at the heart of what we do. Many of our clients first come to RESTORE through the books written by our founder and director Benedict Macdonald. These showcase our outstanding commitment to restoring the natural world, and our in-depth experience and expertise: the product of painstaking field study and lived experience.

Triodos Bank UK Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of Triodos Bank NV. Registered Office: Deanery Road, Bristol, BS1 5AS. Registered in England and Wales Company No. 11379025. Authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority under registration number 817008. VAT reg no 793493383.