What We Learned Building the Operating System for the World's Most Advanced Nature Compliance Market
Session Description
Verna used its experience building Mycelia, a platform supporting compliance work for England's Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) policy, as the starting point for a roundtable on what it actually takes to make data-heavy nature policy work in practice. After a short demo of the platform, attendees split into three groups, policymakers, industry and market participants, and tech and data practitioners, to develop and report back principles for their part in designing and delivering effective nature markets. Verna described BNG as, to their knowledge, the first jurisdiction to make quantitative biodiversity net gain a standard, enforceable planning condition, a model they see as offering lessons for the newer compliance frameworks now emerging elsewhere.
Speakers
Jake R, Verna
Matthew Brown, Verna
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
England's Biodiversity Net Gain policy, in force since February 2024, requires new developments to leave nature at least 10% better than its baseline condition, measured and maintained for 30 years. Jake said that, to Verna's knowledge, England is the first jurisdiction to make quantitative biodiversity net gain a standard, enforceable planning condition.
The policy has driven real results: more than 7,000 hectares of off-site habitat, roughly the size of Zurich, has been secured for 30-year terms so far, not counting on-site gains the methodology also incentivises.
The practical challenges are significant. The core assessment tool has 18 tabs and can span many habitat parcels, each needing its own type, condition, and distinctiveness ratings. Local planning authorities struggle to hire enough ecologists, misunderstanding and gaming of the rules is common (often unintentional), and most case data lives scattered across PDFs, spreadsheets, and individual inboxes rather than any central system, despite each case creating a 30-year obligation.
Verna's response, Mycelia, is used by over 100 organisations (per Verna's session brief) and, per the session itself, more than 3,000 individual users, with adopting planning authorities covering more than half of England's land area. It automatically reads and checks submitted biodiversity metrics for errors and tampering, flags common risk patterns identified through consultation with ecologists, and visualises how habitats change from baseline through intervention to final outcome.
As a roundtable, the session split attendees into three discussion groups by lens, policymakers (setting rules), industry and market participants (delivering within the rules at scale), and tech and data practitioners (building supporting infrastructure), each developing and reporting back their own principles.
The policymaker group's reported principles centred on needing a strong scientific baseline for long-term integrity, understanding how similar frameworks perform in other countries, building in checks and balances against gaming, and creating context-specific rather than one-size-fits-all measurement approaches. They also raised the value of cross-party political support, similar to the UK's Climate Change Act, to stop nature policy from being unwound each time governments change.
The industry and market group emphasised long-term policy certainty as the main lever for getting corporates to invest confidently over multi-decade project timelines, alongside clear, consistent metrics, direct communication with policymakers about what industry actually needs, and recognising that risk, not just opportunity, drives most corporate funding decisions.
The tech and data group focused on a disconnect between government's data needs and the reality of dozens of siloed companies collecting incompatible data that rarely makes it back to government in usable form. Their proposed fix: clearer government-set data standards and shared infrastructure like common APIs, so collected data can actually be aggregated and used at a national level.
Verna closed with four lessons from building Mycelia: nature recovery requires coordination software because manual tracking breaks down at national scale; geospatial mapping alone isn't enough, other data formats like chronological timelines are sometimes more useful for decision-making; software can flag risks but can't replace human expert judgement, since it lacks the full context and experience a human ecologist brings; and, as a closing point they left as a teaser for their website, they believe AI's positive impact on nature can outweigh its environmental footprint if used well.
