Funding for species recovery projects - coming soon

To support activities that help reduce the risk of national extinction for threatened species, Natural England has announced that the Species Recovery Programme is holding a ‘call for ideas’.

There is a short window to express interest in the programme with an overview of the planned project, closing on 2 November 2025. Natural England will then assess the projects and invite some to submit a full funding application. Projects selected will need to take place between summer 2026 and March 2029.

The scheme operates around the activities set out by Natural England in its Threatened Species Recovery Actions guidance and lists a total of 3,631 potential actions, 2,015 of which are eligible for the Species Recovery Programme funding. Each activity is linked to a particular species of flora or fauna which is threatened in the UK.

Examples of eligible activities include:

• Restoring, creating and maintaining high-quality hedgehog habitat
• Undertaking conservation translocations of the smooth snake
• Research into inoculation of saplings with mycorrhiza of the Orange Chanterelle fungus

The scheme is focused on specific activities, rather than holistic approaches to ecosystem improvement.

The biggest caveat is that this scheme cannot be used to pay for activities which could be funded by other government schemes, such as Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. It also cannot be used for activities categorised as ‘landscape management’ in the guidance.

For projects, funding requests must be between £10,000 and £1.5m, although this does not need to be the whole cost of the project, and Natural England is encouraging match-funded applications. If the funding desired for your project only makes up part of the overall costs, there needs to be clear differentiation between what each funding pot is paying for to avoid any duplication.

It is a one-off grant rather than ongoing funding, so if your species recovery project will require maintenance, it’s worth thinking about how you plan to fund that. 

Finally, the grant cannot be used for profit and must represent good value for public money.

The total scheme budget is currently unknown, and Natural England has not said how many projects it plans to approve.

Once it has established that a project meets the eligibility criteria (i.e. is an action from the guidance), Natural England will base its decision on the value for money of the project and the suitability of the activities proposed to achieve the action. For example, if your project was based on creating a high-quality habitat for hedgehogs, it would consider whether the specific steps you plan to take would be effective in creating that habitat.

The guidance and application form can be found on the Natural England website. The ten-page form asks for details of the project, including how it links to the Local Nature Recovery Strategy for the area, or any species conservation strategies that might be in place.