A message from the board: Four big wins for Scotland’s rural economy
As you all know, our desire to accelerate progress towards Scotland’s necessarily ambitious nature-recovery targets, whilst boosting community agency and prosperity, led us to take out two loans totalling £12 million in 2023. With that we acquired land fabulously fit for rewilding purpose and built a locally-rooted team to begin the process of monetising the natural capital. On Monday we completed asset sales sufficient to pay back the first of the two loans: the remaining £4.0M of the original £12M loan loaned by the National Wealth Fund, £6M having been refinanced in June 2023 by Top Online Group Partners, and £2M repaid from the proceeds of land sales subsequently to the Tayvallich Initiative and Barrahormid Trust.
The purpose of this message is to set out what we have achieved with the loans. We will soon share our latest ‘on the ground’ rewilding updates from our science, estate and community teams in our spring newsletter.
Despite operating in a policy landscape moving far more slowly than seemed likely when we started up in 2022, we have made major strides in demonstrating that nature recovery can be both financially viable and socially transformative. We are now progressing towards repaying our remaining loan, to digital retailer Top Online Partners, through further asset sales.
As you appreciate, taking out these loans was risky, but necessary because of the urgency of reversing biodiversity collapse and climate meltdown and worthwhile because of four wins we have achieved with them for the Scottish rural economy, for Scotland’s depleted biodiversity, and the wider cause of nature recovery. We are grateful to the National Wealth Fund and Top Online Partners for lending us the money with which to achieve these. Their investments have enabled us to give a clear flavour of what will be possible once the nascent nature recovery market takes off.
The four wins, as we see them, are:
1. Successfully demonstrating a model of community-landowner-company synergy capable of delivering nature recovery at scale.
The flagship example of this is the Highlands Rewilding partnership with local charity, the Barrahormid Trust, in Tayvallich. Highlands Rewilding is managing the land for nature recovery and community prosperity under a lease granted by the Barrahormid Trust. The two organisations will share the profits from monetised natural capital (carbon and biodiversity uplifts) on a win-win basis, with the local community both staffing the local Highlands Rewilding team and filling most seats on the estate management board.
2. Developing a business plan capable of monetising data-backed natural capital and pioneering private investment into Scotland’s fight to reverse declining biodiversity.
With public funding and philanthropy alone unable to meet Scotland’s ambitious biodiversity target of reversing biodiversity collapse Highlands Rewilding has prepared a business plan, based on its data led land-management partnership model, which has the potential for ethical profitability at a level that in other markets would be acceptable to pension funds.
It is a key goal of the Scottish government to make nature investable for private financial institutions, especially pension funds. Highlands Rewilding has been pioneering production of the data required to make carbon and biodiversity uplifts verifiable and investment grade.
Our market-leading data reports have set a high standard for trustworthy, science-backed nature credits, and we are in the process of evolving our business model to expand this work. The company will seek to make our own natural-capital uplifts verifiable, whilst setting standards that help the wider embryonic nature industry do the same.
3. Community agency in land management for nature recovery, and ways to allow communities to prosper.
The Memorandum of Understanding between Highlands Rewilding and the Tayvallich Initiative, in place for more than a year, involves 24 mutually agreed action items.
The selling of land at cost to a local community has enabled it to pursue its top priority for self-help. This has been the sale of land to the Tayvallich Initiative, for the building of affordable homes.
The selling of tenanted homes to tenants, with rural housing burdens attached, has provided security in the face of potential future land sales. This has been achieved twice in Tayvallich.
The creation of fulfilling jobs in the service of nature and community. The company currently employs 23 people, most of whom live in or near the communities wherein they work. The company also has an alumnus network most of whom are still in nature recovery work.
4. Real-life victories for nature, including buying land for rewilding that would otherwise have been bought by people who don’t care about the biodiversity and climate crises, and who would have managed the land in ways that accelerate them.
Highlands Rewilding has turned the land it operates into outdoor laboratories for science-driven natural capital monetisation and published four acclaimed and market-leading natural capital reports. The unique depth and breadth of these reports has made a significant contribution to understanding patterns of biodiversity and the embryonic natural capital market in Scotland, and helped to ensure this market develops with high quality and consistent monitoring which is vital for reversing current biodiversity loss. The company has also implemented environmentally sensitive plans to store and sequester carbon via forest-to-bog restoration and forestry operations, enhanced deer management, and Atlantic Rainforest Restoration.
We are now in the process of selling the land we acquired to buyers who care about nature recovery, and will continue to manage the land for nature. We have sold 56% of the land we owned and all of it has gone to nature lovers. We have signed up land-management partnerships for 69% of that land. We are trying as hard as we can to sell the remaining 44% of the land we own to nature lovers, and preferably nature lovers who will want us to manage it in partnership.
Our frontier adventure has been a rocky ride so far, and still is. The wonderful team at Highlands Rewilding is fighting hard to lead our ship to calmer waters, with wind in her sails, so that we can achieve the dream inherent in our purpose: nature recovery and community prosperity through rewilding taken to scale. Unless we and/or others can achieve that dream, at a national scale, nothing else will ultimately matter. A liveable future will not be possible in a world where biodiversity continues to collapse.
More soon
All best
The Highlands Rewilding Board