Environment Bank BNG Habitat Bank Network (England)

England's Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) regime, created under the Environment Act 2021, became mandatory on 12 February 2024, requiring most new developments to deliver a measurable 10% net gain in biodiversity value, calculated with the statutory biodiversity metric. Where a developer cannot deliver the full gain on-site, it must buy off-site biodiversity units from registered habitat banks; these purchases are secured by legal agreements requiring 30 years of habitat management and are recorded on Natural England's public biodiversity gain sites register.

The Environment Bank Limited, headquartered in York, describes itself as operating England's largest network of BNG habitat banks, converting historically low-biodiversity farmland into created or restored habitat across every English region. By December 2024, 16 of its habitat banks had been added to Natural England's national register, unlocking more than 2,000 off-site biodiversity units for developers to purchase.

The broader market this practice operates in is still ramping up: because securing land and completing registration is a multi-year process and the national mandate only began in February 2024, most habitat banks nationally are newly created rather than mature, so the long-term (30-year) ecological outcomes that BNG legally requires have not yet had time to be independently verified — a reminder that unit creation and completed, monitored habitat delivery are two different stages of the same 30-year commitment.

Read the full analysis: https://environmentbank.com/biodiversity-units/habitat-bank-bng-network/