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When Lydia Clare, Non-Executive Director of the Environmental Trading Platform, approached Natural Apptitude, her vision was clear: to create the "Rightmove" for the environmental sector. The goal was to build a transparent, digital platform capable of matching providers of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and Nutrient Credits with the developers who need them most.
The Challenge
Unlike a standard directory, this project required a robust, custom-built architecture capable of navigating the intricate overlaps of UK environmental policy and geography.
- Geospatial Context: Credits are catchment-specific and location-bound. The platform required a custom platform to handle complex spatial queries across multiple boundaries.
- High-Capacity Scalability: The platform needed to be inherently scalable to manage a rapidly growing number of organisations without compromising performance.
- Technical UX Design: The interface serves a broad spectrum of users from ecologists and architects to large-scale planning developers. The challenge was to refine complex geospatial searches into an intuitive user experience without compromising technical rigour or data accuracy.
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The Custom Solution
The resulting platform integrates the complexity of overlapping environmental data, allowing users to perform multi-layered searches for BNG units and nutrient credits.
- Advanced Geospatial Search Engine: For customers seeking a solution for their project, the platform offers a map-based search engine to source the right units in the right place. Users can filter by specific criteria such as catchments, local planning authorities, and habitat classifications.
- Streamlined Provider Workflows: The platform offers credit providers a dedicated management interface, allowing them to list and manage their environmental assets with ease. This ensures a "level playing field," giving smaller providers the same visibility as large-scale habitat banks.
- Standardised Data Architecture: To ensure total transparency, Natural Apptitude built the platform around a structured data model. By enforcing specific entry fields for habitat metrics and locations, all listings are consistent, comparable, and verified.
"The Natural Apptitude team have been extremely helpful from the outset, and it has been a pleasure to work with them."
Lydia Clare, Non-Executive Director, ETP
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The Result
Launched in September 2024, the ETP has successfully democratised the market. By removing financial barriers to entry and providing a high-performance digital discovery tool, the platform now hosts over 450 organisations. It remains a vital resource for facilitating the green economy during a period of significant regulatory change.
Our work on the Environmental Trading Platform reflects Natural Apptitude’s extensive industry knowledge. Building a bespoke discovery engine for BNG and Nutrient Credits requires more than just coding - it requires an understanding of how environmental data is collected, categorised, and reported on the ground.
The Bigger Picture
By staying at the forefront of how these markets evolve, we ensure that all our projects -from custom geospatial platforms to our specialised data collection tools - are built to handle the real-world complexities that ecologists face every day.
Read the News article
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The website is very transparent and easy to use... it has been a game changer for the smaller providers who can easily find what they want.
Lydia Clare
Non-Executive Director
ETP
The website is very transparent and easy to use... it has been a game changer for the smaller providers who can easily find what they want.
Lydia Clare
Non-Executive Director
ETP
