Working with NatureScot and a wide range of Scottish organisations in the climate, biodiversity and green areas, CivTech has created a series of Missions that lock into and resonate with each organisation’s objectives: they have all been built from priorities already been identified in Scotland’s Environment Strategy and NatureScot’s Biodiversity Strategy.

Through active delivery against the Missions, we’ll be able to harness the full power of innovation to improve the natural environment, and respond to the climate and nature emergencies. Innovation alone cannot answer everything we need to do, but by developing Mission-led Challenges, we will help to ensure each of the projects is part of a bigger picture, and plays the fullest role possible role in it.

No more siloed thinking. Instead, collaborative joint working…

And larger Challenges.

Over time, each Mission will engage multiple organisations from across the public and third sectors to develop a pipeline of CivTech Challenges. CivTech will drive a rolling programme of Challenge calls under these Missions, putting organisations with specific problems together with innovative companies, and through the CivTech system, develop solutions to those problems.

The Missions form a journey from understanding the biodiversity crisis to taking the right action in the right place, evaluating the outcomes and building trust for investment. Our work will involve communities and collaborative action. It will address how we must adapt to living in, and build resilience to, a changing climate.

By running concurrent Missions with interrelated challenges we will see cross-pollination of ideas, knowledge, innovation approaches and collaboration between Challenge teams

Mission 1 — What is measured matters

What is measured matters: How do we develop a meaningful understanding of the biodiversity crisis to inform the actions we need to take to address it?

This seeks to address the need to better understand biodiversity in various different dimensions: fill gaps in the measurement and metrics for biodiversity; address the need to understand data on biodiversity at different scales (eg local and national levels or varying timescales); support organisations with development of their metrics and ensuring these can be used to drive change, support decision making and measure progress; understand the relationship between different dimensions of biodiversity and better understand and predict impacts of interventions.

Current Mission 1 Challenge:

Mission 2 — More than carbon

More than Carbon: How do we develop a system for investment in nature projects that delivers for more than just carbon?

This seeks to address both the need for private investment to support wider biodiversity measures, improve natural capital and systems for nature, and to balance the impacts of carbon focused initiatives with wider biodiversity. A fundamental requirement related to Mission 1 is the need to better quantify outcomes from investment in nature projects and to develop methods for evidencing impacts to build trust.

How do we connect people or groups who have ideas with people or groups who can fund projects; how can we provide “decision grade” data for investors across a wide range of projects; how can we prioritise which solutions to fund with both public and private sector investment?

Current Challenges:

Mission 3 — Community

Be the change: How do we support decision making, community ownership and collaboration to address the combined Biodiversity and Climate Crisis?

This is focused on engaging with people and communities to support decision making and collective action required to deliver the changes required to address the combined biodiversity loss and climate crisis. These include changes at local and national scales, across a range of different solutions.

Current Challenges:

Mission 4 — Living with climate change

Living with climate change by fostering more complexity and diversity in our landscapes and seascapes: this includes the role of nature-based solutions in towns and settlements, especially on coasts and rivers, to build resilience to the effects of climate change, and how nature can help us to live in a warming world and manage climate risks

This is focused on managing climate risks, which require diversity and complexity at all scales in our use of the land and sea. It includes nature-based solutions, how we co-design these with the communities involved, what skills we need to deliver and how we communicate the need and the benefit of planning with and for nature. This includes challenges around a strategic approach to green infrastructure. This mission relates to Mission 3 but is focused on nature-based solutions.

We are currently developing Challenges under this mission.

There’s more coming…

Innovate for Nature is the first of our Innovate for… missions. We’ll soon be launching Innovate for the Economy, Innovate for Care, Wellbeing and Health, Innovate for Communities and Innovate for the Citizen. More will follow, and all will have the characteristics of multiple involved organisations, and massive opportunities to change the face of Scotland using tech for good, and offering innovators and ambitious companies ever greater opportunities.