Sustainability-focused GovTech start-up shares experience of working with government

CreditNature provides investment solutions for public sector organisations looking to reduce their impact on the environment, and was recently featured in Innovation Alley, the start-up zone of Government Transformation Expo.

Their Operations Manager Robyn Silcock shared the company's focus, and their experience of attending the biggest public sector transformation event of the year.

What do CreditNature do?   

Silcock explained the company is driven by one big aim, saying “our vision is to re-wild half the planet by 2050.” They have a dual approach to achieving this aim, focusing both on creating land management technologies and encouraging corporates to invest in these technologies. 

She explains: “we have built a platform that enables us to relay on a scale of 0-100 the baseline condition of a piece of land, and the impact of current land management activities on it. The latter is reported a bit like energy ratings; imagine that green, yellow and red banding graph.” These ratings relate to how biodiverse the land is based on various metrics. 

Following this baselines assessment, landowners are provided with a management plan for improving diversity over time. The other side of the business speaks to corporates and encourages them to invest in these land management projects.

Again, CreditNature employ technological solutions to achieve this as Silcock describes: “we've designed it so that corporates, land holders, and project developers can log in and see the measurements improving over time, reflecting biodiversity increasing and that ecosystem becoming more stable.” 

Using this information companies can run reports and KPIs and share with customers and shareholders their nature-positive investments. For businesses, the aim is to be “moving into an even more transparent and reportable journey for all our customers” towards a greener future. 

How did you get involved in transforming the public sector?

CreditNature became involved with government through working with Scottish Government's CivTech programme. The company won a challenge to create a nature market in Scotland with the Scottish Government and NatureScot. 

Sillcock emphasised her hopes that CreditNature will help to really drive government transformation saying: “we're really hopeful that all of the science, all of the innovation, all of the policy work that we've been doing, will encourage others to help us kick-start a trustworthy nature market.”

What has been your experience working with government? 

Silcock spoke positively about the process of working with government saying “we had ideas of what might work, but they challenged us in a really positive way to make it viable.” She described how working with government had helped them to validate their ideas, but also build on them, thinking about their project in different contexts, consider different use cases and “really hone” their ideas. 

Ultimately this meant the partnership led to the creation of “a procurement ready product.” Silcock credits “excellent” individuals within government for this and says she is looking forward to their ideas being taken forwards, with the Scottish government planning to have CreditNature’s framework in place by 2026.   

What have you learned from the visitors to Government Transformation Expo?

For Silcock, “what's been lovely is the internal networking element” speaking to other start-ups in a similar position to CreditNature and to bigger companies about their journeys.

She gives the example of implementing agile project methodology saying she has spoken to people at another start-up on Innovation Alley about this as  “they've used the same project management methodologies or similar and had similar challenges to us and they've shared how they used them successfully, or overcome barriers.”

Silcock says it's these “pearls of wisdom” and “what you can glean from people who are either in a similar position to us or a few years down the line just to help us learn and grow” that makes the event a valuable experience.