Mini meadows for business
Are you a business looking to protect our planet? Then this is for you!
Mini Meadows Ocean Fund enables you to directly support hands-on seagrass conservation and is a pioneering way to enhance your sustainability credentials and meet your ESG goals. Your contribution will have an array of long-lasting, tangible benefits for nature, and we will help you tell the story of your impact. For every donation made, you will receive a personalised digital certificate and a Mini Meadows marketing toolkit.
1 Mini Meadow needs £50 to support our conservation work over a 5 year period, the minimum timeline nature needs. 1 Mini Meadow has the potential to:
- Provide a habitat for over 1,000 marine animals
- Capture 9.6kgs of carbon (roughly the equivalent of driving a petrol car for 100km)
- Capture 4.2kgs of nitrogen
- Support oxygen production, reduce coastal erosion and inspire a lasting connection between people and the Ocean.
You choose the number of Mini Meadows you support based on the impact you want to have, there is no limit! For example, £1,000 could fund 20 Mini Meadows, £10,000 could fund 200 Mini Meadows, £100,000 could fund 2,000 Mini Meadows.*
Your journey with us doesn’t stop there. We will keep you up to date with what we achieved with your support via our regular Blue Meadows bulletins and our annual impact report.
Are you ready to work towards a future with a healthy, thriving Ocean? Then please fill in the form!
*We ask businesses to support a minimum of 20 Mini Meadows, which allows you to make more impactful contribution towards our work.
Frequently asked questions
Blue Meadows works across the southwest of the UK, covering over 200 miles of coastline, from Falmouth to Poole!
We are currently operating across 5 sites in Falmouth, Plymouth, Torbay, Studland and Poole. Using Sensitive Habitat Marker Buoys, we have protected 215 hectares of seagrass meadows across these sites (using 86 marker buoys) and have restored 12 hectares of this vital habitat. 8 of these restored hectares were part of the ReMEDIES project, with plans to continue our restoration work in Falmouth in 2025.
A ‘Mini Meadow’ is symbolic area of seagrass and is a scalable way to support our Blue Meadows programme (UK) as an entity rather than just funding a particular area. Mini Meadows acts a stepping stone towards a model where we can track and measure more precisely at the level of detail needed to report on a physical Mini Meadow.
Our work aligns with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14) – Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. By contributing to our Mini Meadows Ocean Fund, you can have a positive impact on biodiversity and the climate, helping you to meet current and emerging ESG and CSR frameworks and to further enhance your green and blue credentials. We are keen to work with likeminded organisations in helping you to achieve your environmental and nature-based commitments.
The science and methodology for verified and high-integrity carbon and biodiversity credits in the marine environment is still being developed. Mini Meadows is not a formal credit, nor is it ‘off-setting’, but rather a voluntary targeted donation model which encourages connectedness with and positive action for the marine environment. It represents a stepping stone to a mature marine ecosystem service market, which we and others are working hard towards. The protection and restoration of our seagrass habitats needs vital and urgent investment, put simply: Nature cannot wait.
The measurement and reporting of the ecosystem services arising from the work supported by the Mini Meadows Ocean Fund will contribute towards the evidence and techniques needed to continue building out the full-scale ecosystem service markets for seagrass in the UK. We continue to work towards verification models, for example through PhD candidates dedicated to advancing understanding of ES delivery and finance mechanisms using our programme and metrics.
If formal credits become available, we hope you will consider continuing your journey with us with verified credits, which will be offered to you in the first instance.
The approximate ecosystem benefits provided for Mini Meadows will be based on best available evidence for current understanding of Zostera marina seagrass beds within the UK, from peer-review literature and our own research. The figures are derived from a modelled period of 30 years of restored seagrass to reach maturity and calculated for a timeframe of 5 years support based on costings for our contemporary methods. This includes all aspects of our programme costs, such as restoration, protection, monitoring, community engagement and learning and critical research into the ecological values of seagrass. These figures are under review as part of our ongoing research efforts which your contribution is supporting and are subject to change.
Healthy seagrass meadows sustain community wellbeing and cultural heritage, inspiring a lasting connection to the Ocean, helping people to feel happy, calm and healthy. According to our recent perception survey with 1476 total responses, 92% of respondents feel seagrass meadows are important to their wellbeing and 97% of people feel positive emotions after interacting with seagrass.
As reported by the UN Environment Programme, seagrass is found in 159 countries on six continents, with more than 1 billion people living within 100 km of a seagrass meadow, thus potentially benefiting from their provisioning, regulating and cultural services. This can include (and not limited to): food security from fish production, improved quality of water filtered by seagrasses, protection of coasts from erosion, storms and floods or carbon sequestration and storage.
Whilst Mini Meadows doesn’t include direct volunteering with our seagrass work, we encourage joining our business membership, our Ocean Horizons Network to encompass tangible seagrass conservation with team digital engagement opportunities.
We do offer direct volunteering opportunities with our seagrass for businesses supporting us at a main partnership level (£10,000 pa +).
We carefully review all Mini Meadows applications to ensure they align with our organisation’s values and avoid any significant conflicts of interest. We encourage businesses with a genuine commitment to benefiting the planet to apply- because we believe that restoring the health of our Ocean is only possible through collaboration.
