Simon is the Strategic Digital Adviser for EnTrade and Director of Radical IT, a boutique
software consultancy founded with a diverse team of experts with a shared passion for agile working. A staunch advocate for agile methodologies, Simon and his team at Radical IT thrives on delivering innovative practical solutions for complex challenges, fostering a culture of excellence, collaboration and agility.

As Chief Information Officer, on secondment from Arup, Vikki is spearheading EnTrade's digital strategy and infrastructure to drive innovation and scalability. With over 25 years of experience in water and regulatory environments as well as digital leadership, Vikki excels in building high-performing teams, optimising processes and aligning technology with business goals. 

Reflections on developing a world-leading digital solution for high integrity nature markets

We love a cutting-edge digital challenge.  Having worked together on plenty of groundbreaking projects before, Arup and Radical IT bring a tried-and-tested formula to digital design.  However, when EnTrade asked us to build a digital market platform from scratch in six months, we understood we were in for an exciting challenge – one that would push our skills and creativity to the limit.  While we were building on EnTrade’s robust legal and governance framework including established Market Rules and market processes, developing a platform to put these into practice was breaking new ground.

With the platform going live this week, now is a timely moment to reflect on the lessons we’ve learned from the experience:

1. Designing and operating environmental markets requires multiple areas of expertise

Environmental markets need to integrate environmental, legal, social, and economic principles into a coherent market design. This will deliver real environmental improvement, provide confidence and certainty for participants, and create the efficiencies needed to make solutions commercially viable. Without market infrastructures and regulatory frameworks established by government, this can only be achieved by bringing together the right sets of diverse expertise to inform the digital design and build.   

The virtual team we assembled to deliver this project bridged scientific and land management disciplines. It included the know-how in the core EnTrade team, project developers like the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, the experienced market designers at Wheatley Young Partners, academics from the University of Exeter, knowledgeable in the detailed trading rules, data governance advice from the Open Data Institute and legal expertise in how the intangible property rights are traded from Osborne Clarke.  

The digital platform is a product of these core capabilities coming together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.  All these skills were an essential prerequisite to the market-leading software development skills in the Radical IT team, ably supported by the Information Security functions in the YTL UK Group and its partners.

2. Think, Do, Show: Agile to the fore!  

The Agile method of software development was well suited to the development of the EnTrade platform.  Agile is an iterative and collaborative approach that emphasises flexibility, customer feedback and rapid delivery of functional software.  Agile gave us the structure to move fast, test early, and adapt as we went - essential for delivering something this novel in such a short timeframe. The Radical IT business model is all about utilising the Agile approach to hit projects hard, fast and learn by doing.  This is why we insisted on training and certifying the EnTrade team with our ICAgile-accredited program AgileTeamBuilder before project kick-off.  We could never have built the platform using the more traditional Waterfall method (a linear and sequential approach to software development where each phase must be completed before the next begins) as we were undertaking such a novel task.

Agile underpinned our ability to work together as a virtual team to co-design the platform. The pace and discipline of hitting our milestones for each Sprint created some occasional friction but the EnTrade team were all converts to Agile well before the project concluded!

3. Digital provides the functionality to handle complexity  

The EnTrade markets involve housing developers, water companies, farmers, regulators, environmental organisations and Local Authorities. All have different needs.  To meet these diverse needs, the markets have been designed to facilitate trade between multiple buyers and suppliers for multiple environmental services in different geographic areas.  This introduces a level of complexity that can only be efficiently managed using a digital application.

With the market platform now in place, EnTrade will be able to standardise its market model and build operating systems to enable it to scale up rapidly from its initial pilot markets.

4. Digital supports market integrity

One of the biggest obstacles facing the use of nature markets is the deep distrust in the use of markets to deliver environmental outcomes.  This distrust is based on fears of greenwashing and the well-publicised failures in markets such as voluntary carbon and biodiversity offsets.

From the outset, the EnTrade team were crystal clear that market integrity lies at the core of its business model and value proposition.  We quickly came to regard the platform as a key market infrastructure that underpins market integrity.  By the end of the two-day workshop we ran to kick the project off, we had already taken a critical policy decision that we were going to start with the hard bit and build the market registries at the back end of the platform.  We know that digital is key to quantifying and providing evidence of the environmental outcomes being delivered through markets.  So the EnTrade platform has robust registries that will provide transparency over the source of the environmental credits traded in the EnTrade markets and enable the team, regulators and local authorities to track them from cradle to grave.

5. Looking to the future – integrity must underpin scaled-up markets

We think that EnTrade has set the standard for what a well-designed, high-integrity nature market should look like. We now need the Government to come to the party to establish a clear policy on the role of nature markets in delivering environmental improvements and a coherent regulatory framework of legally enforceable rules and metrics.  With the right policy and regulatory framework in place, investors and corporates can be confident in market integrity and UK plc will have a model that could be exported across the world.  Digital then needs to be at the heart of how we scale up these markets and mobilise the $37 trillion that the United Nations has estimated is needed to finance nature recovery across the globe.  

Our vision is for digital to facilitate nothing short of a paradigm shift in how we deliver nature and climate recovery.  We foresee a future where digital systems help to facilitate the integrated delivery of clean energy, water quality improvement and nature recovery, accelerating investment in environmental improvement and delivering spaces and places for local communities.  One of the pivotal moments in the project was a day out on the Belmont Estate to see nature recovery in action and witness for ourselves the environmental and social benefits of a river restoration project.  This was the day that the penny dropped for some of our Arup and Radical IT colleagues on what the EnTrade team had been championing.

To achieve this vision for the future, we need platforms and tools that are accredited and accepted by governments and regulators and can be applied consistently across different geographies.  These platforms and tools need to support contracts and agreements for long-term projects.  We need better models to quantify the benefits of nature-based solutions and cost-effective ways to monitor and demonstrate the outcomes – over the very long term.  

For us, going live with the EnTrade platform is just the end of the beginning.  Whilst we’re incredibly proud of this milestone achievement, we and the EnTrade team are bursting with ideas for improving the platform’s functionality.  We know too that we will need our buyers and suppliers to support us with insight and feedback.  With the first round of the Cornwall Nature Market approaching, we look forward to seeing the platform go live and delivering its purpose: to facilitate the fair, efficient and transparent delivery of local nature recovery.