Carbon, Research and Additionality - Interview with Ben Hart

Theo Stanley is a researcher from the University of Oxford, currently undertaking fieldwork for his PhD in Environmental Geography. He is researching how the increased turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ and land-based carbon sequestration is affecting land governance in the Scottish Highlands. Throughout 2022, he is interviewing a wide range of folk interested in ‘nature-based solutions’, including foresters, land owners, entrepreneurs, rewilders and carbon specialists. If you have any questions, comments or opinions about the project, please don’t hesitate to contact him: theo.stanley@hertford.ox.ac.uk.

 This article is a transcript of an interview between Theo and Bunloit’s Ben Hart.

Bunloit Peatland

 TS: Let’s start with who Bunloit is and what the project is about. 

BH: We are a natural capital company set up by Jeremy Leggett, an eco-entrepreneur, who most recently built and sold the UK’s largest solar company. In March 2020 he purchased land on the side of Loch Ness called the Bunloit estate, which is a 510-hectare estate, which was bought with his own money and by raising funds from a Green Bond via 32 high net-worth investors. 

Bunloit was purchased as a natural capital entity, and it was specifically purchased because it has a mosaic of different land types: peatland at the top, conifer plantations, some of which are planted on peat, going into ancient grasslands and native woodland of oak and birch right at the bottom, by the side of the loch.

The whole estate has been managed over the last 18 months as an open laboratory for natural capital. What I have been doing is leading the program of mapping the carbon and biodiversity stocks on the land.

It's also worth saying separately that the Bunloit Rewilding entity has a separate estate that was bought in May of last year, called Beldorney, which is a 350-hectare estate just north of the Cairngorms. That estate was purchased because it has more immediate opportunity for natural capital development. About 78% of it is ex-sheep pasture: overgrazed, degraded soils and very poor biodiversity. 

Bunloit estate is our primary scientific testbed and Beldorney is our primary natural capital management entity. We have a new company called Highlands Rewilding which has been raising further funds, that will operate Bunloit moving forward and purchase Beldorney and other tracts of land across the Highlands to scale and manage them using the lessons we have learned from Bunloit. 

 
TS: To be explicit, the main reason why Bunloit does not have as much potential is because it is less degraded than Beldorney?

BH: Well, there’s two reasons. Yes – it’s less degraded land, and more pristine land on the shores of Loch Ness. It’s very lovely. The second reason is the concept of additionality. Fundamentally the whole natural capital concept is to quantify and create an economic value for natural ecosystems, essentially that people will pay for. 

Currently, a single tree is worth more cut down dead than it is alive, because there is more value in the timber than all the other services it provides: but that tree supports life, fresh air, soil stabilisation, water, sequestration. It is more valuable in a holistic sense than as a piece of timber. Natural capital tries to value all those different concepts, to create an economic value of those natural services. And fundamentally it needs to find a buyer for those values. Currently, the buyers are offsetters – people or companies who wish to offset their own carbon footprint.  

The concept of additionality is crucial for a high-quality carbon credit. It basically says, if I am going to buy 100k tonnes of carbon from a land manager, I need to know that that money is being spent on ‘additional’ carbon sequestration. Otherwise, you create greenwashing and negative impacts, because the money I’m using to offset my carbon isn’t actually offsetting any carbon. For example, an existing forest that is already there, isn’t offsetting anything as it already exists. And that is greenwashing. So, the carbon markets are very clear, that carbon needs to be additional to access funding. 

What that means for us, because the estate is in a good condition, and it’s already 80% wooded, is that there are very few areas where we can grow more carbon. There are very few areas where we can plant new trees without destroying biodiversity. That’s the challenge with Bunloit. What we can do is take trees off the land. Most of the non-native conifer plantations have been planted on peatland areas. So these non-native plantations are biodiversity wastelands, as well as drying out the peat and creating lots of released emissions from that peatland. 

The trouble we have is that the Peatland Code (PC) - which is the carbon credit scheme that would normally provide income for the ongoing recovery of that peatland - doesn’t recognise plantations on peatland as peatland habitats. It recognises them as plantations. And therefore, there’s no restoration funding available. So, we are in this situation where we have existing woodlands and nowhere to plant new woodlands, and therefore it’s not additional. Or the current carbon credit schemes do not see the removal of plantations from peatlands as a valuable thing to do, or do not have the scientific evidence to support this, even though that is what everyone has told us is what we should do. 

So now we are working with the PC and Peatland Action, who are the funding schemes for peatland restoration. The non-native plantations are being clear-felled and we had a walk-around in December with the funding schemes to look at a restoration and monitoring program, working with the James Hutton Institute and others, to monitor the carbon released from these clear-felled areas. Hopefully, over the next few years, as we restore and recover these peatland areas, we can prove that we are moving them from a source of carbon to a sink. 

That’s the reason why Bunloit isn’t worth as much from a carbon natural capital point of view. Beldorney on the other hand is much better. It has all these grassland areas, and we could have 300 hectares of tree planting. This wouldn’t be a pure rewilding project, unless we go for natural colonisation, but it would be a natural capital project to kick-start natural processes. You could create a large new woodland, which is something we could quantify and sell on the carbon market. This is something we are looking at – called ‘The Forest of Hope.’

Beldorney - Forest of Hope area

TS: Highlands Rewilding is a company that’s trying to make money to break even, but if the carbon infrastructures don’t see what Bunloit Estate is doing as something ‘additional’, then where does that leave you? 

BH: Well, that’s the point. Right now, it’s making very little money. We are currently in a ‘valley of death’, hoping that Scottish natural capital schemes turn up, but the way that policy is going, it’s not coming that quickly. We need to work out how to survive for the next few years, relying on investor funding to bridge the gap.

What we are trying to do with Bunloit Estate is:

a.     Learn what we need to do

b.     Identify the key challenges that are stopping the change that needs to happen 

c.     Scale the new system 

One of the reasons why Highlands Rewilding exists is to identify problems and work by providing more empirical data into the evidence base. If we can help to unlock the creation of income streams from restoring these areas under plantations for example, suddenly it becomes more valuable to restore rather than have the timber. That is the step-change in land management and peatland restoration. All we can do is provide more research into the evidence base that helps push that dial forward.

Another example is the ancient woodlands that we have got. With additionality, it’s correct and right that people shouldn’t pay money for carbon offsets from those woodlands, as they are already a carbon stock. The Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) maxes out at a hundred years. If I plant trees now, in a hundred years’ time, we would have gotten all the carbon from that woodland, because the forest is in balance. All the natural emissions from those trees and that land offset any sequestration going on. You’ve got an important stock of carbon but no additional sequestration.

There’s currently no help and support for land managers to maintain that store of carbon. Ironically, the most value we could get from the ancient woodland is to chop that whole thing down for timber, because there’s no financial incentive to keep it the condition it is. We can’t get any carbon income because of additionality. That’s a challenge: it’s worth more to us to chop down a beautiful ancient woodland and replace it with conifer plantations. Which is basically what has happened all the way around the Loch. At some point, someone has cut down all the ancient woodland and replaced it with these horrible Sitka spruce plantations, because they get money every 30/40 years. There’s another gap there in the market. How do we encourage restoration and protection of these ancient woodlands? 

Fundamentally, what we are trying to do at Highlands Rewilding is to create an evidence base and say to people “this is what we have learned and this is what we are going to do differently. And here are the gaps that we have identified in the policy and here’s how we are trying to help out”.

TS: Going out on Bunloit Estate with the rangers and you, and visiting throughout the summer, I saw that the estate isn’t massive and everyone there is really passionate about what they do. I didn’t realise that the estate had a more-than-local or more-than-regional significance. Seeing that you were working with loads of different organisations, all of whom seemed to be doing really cool stuff, from NGOs to private companies, it made me see Highlands Rewilding as way ‘bigger’ in its vision. I was wondering how you built relationships with those other organisations?

BH: Quite frankly, we are just having a go. Being scrappy and loud about it – and that’s just what entrepreneurs do. Jeremy is very good at this on a policy level. He’s very good at connecting with the government and policy makers and having conversations with the right investment companies. My role is just to move everything along. Fundamentally, I just talk to people… some people said “you should talk to Andy, who’s doing interesting stuff at CSX”; Jeremy sent me details about Nature Metrics so we just had a chat with them. Because the market is so new, and Highlands Rewilding has just put itself out there, we have very much tried to be an open innovation hub. We have gotten to a point now, where people are contacting us saying “we want to come test this innovation”, and in a way, we have had to slow it down a bit. We have had so many people wanting help and support that it’s hard to balance the day jobs (chuckles). Which is great! 

Ben and Theo measuring peat depth on Bunloit

TS: I guess that opens space to be a consultancy, rather than just land managers as well?

BH: Yes, it does. But there’s a lot of people that do the consultancy already. One of the reasons why Highlands Rewilding has been so successful is that we are not trying to be a consultant yet, although this could happen in the future. We are talking with all the consultants, competitors to each other– and we aren’t saying “we are trying to provide the services that you provide” – but instead, just saying “we are trying to understand what’s the best way to create a business model that works” and we have four goals: “more carbon, more biodiversity, more jobs and let’s make the whole thing profitable”. That way, we can be quite neutral. 

We recognise there will be very few estates like Bunloit. Not many estates will want (or be able to) spend £100,000 a year on monitoring. What we aim to do is create a swift baseline and spend the rest of the time and effort in actually restoring nature. What we hope to do through this is encourage hundreds of estates, or thousands, to do interventions on their land that bring about positive changes. 

Rewilding Britain are quite good at this. They are developing a monitoring framework, that says “there’s a basic level and a deeper level. Basic level will cost X and the deeper level Y, and actually you can choose where you want to go.” Ivan De Klee – the Head of Natural Capital at Knepp has a good quote here. He says to land managers: you must work out why you need this data, and there are two possible reasons. Firstly, to create the evidence-base to create natural capital income and the other is to create the story you want to tell. 

Why are you creating that data? Income or story.

TS: I noticed a running theme throughout the COP26 event presenters who had done Tier 3 rather than Tier 2 measurement. Can you use Tier 3 to describe biodiversity metrics? (Note: Tiers refer to the IPCC classification of GHG emission calculations.)

BH: The way I describe it is that most biodiversity metrics are Tier 3, in terms of actual measurement, because you are literally counting birds or bats on a sonar detector. A Tier 2 example is ‘Biodiversity Net Gain’, which is a spreadsheet where you assess the habitat type, or UK Habitats with habitat codes. That’s where a lot of the tech is going. You have this scale, going from proxy to measured data. Tier 2 measurements assess what type of land you’ve got, and I know you have x amount of this type of woodland in the Highlands, so we assume you have this Y amount of biodiversity there. All the way through to Tier 3 measuring every single insect and bird, bat, and bee. There’s a spectrum that different projects will want to be on based on aims and available capital. And fundamentally, why? Money and/ or story! 

TS: Yes – it seemed as though all the research partners doing Tier 3 research modelling, every single one of them found more carbon was being captured by forests or more carbon was emitted by peat or there’s more biodiversity. Always it seems that by using ‘deeper’ methods you find more of whatever it is you are looking for. Is that problematic?

BH: No, I don’t think so. Fundamentally, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a business model. But that’s a good thing. It shows more carbon is being drawn down than those models say and that is a multiplier effect. Looking at using the tier 3 level of data, organisations need to ask “do I want to spend extra to do this modelling, to prove that extra value.” I.e., is it worth doing the AgriCarbon or CSX granular measurement, because I am going to get 40% more income from my carbon later down the line? That’s fundamental to the business model of these companies: can you measure carbon more accurately and therefore identify more volume and so create more income. If we make these models conservative, then they provide more impact. If they were the other way round it would be a real issue – i.e., less carbon from actual measurement. I think the Woodland and Peatland codes have got it right being conservative for the data that’s currently available. 

TS: Was there ever a case of ‘more accuracy’ which led to ‘less carbon’?

 BH: CSX is a good example. If you remember the specific plantation in the presentation, the WCC model said that the specific trees planted, at a certain spacing, would create a density of 2,000 trees per hectare. But what happened when CSX did the LIDAR surveys, they found that because of windblow and thinning we weren’t aware of, there’s less trees. When they used AI modelling to count how many trees are in that area, they found that there’s more like 750 to 800 trees per hectare. More than 50 percent less trees. 

Based on their current modelling, they are showing that there are less trees, but that they are bigger and therefore the carbon model is working out about the same. But if we plant a plantation now, using that denser stocking density and we can maintain that stocking density, that could equate to 100% more carbon over time. 

TS: I wonder with all the carbon that had ‘fallen through the cracks’, what’s going to happen to those in natural capital accounting?

BH: Yes, these gaps will be closed over time, but there’s always a cost-benefit ratio to consider. Technology gets better and better over time, and you get better at measuring at a more granular detail. But fundamentally what do we need to know? We need to collect data that shows us how to create interventions to help things grow faster, bigger, more resilient, and we will need to quantify that accurately down the line and prove the initial ideas. Everything we can do now is important, because the next ten, twenty years are really crunch time. 

TS: That’s mad. I guess you need 20 years to prove it.

BH: Yes, but we don’t have 20 years! So, we need to make educated choices using the best currently available data and optimise as we go along and learn more. Hopefully, over the next five to ten years we will be able to see some serious impact - that we then need to scale for the next 100 years or more. It’s a long-term project that will hopefully outlast us all.