Highlands Rewilding receives funding from the Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS)
Highlands Rewilding is delighted to announce that we have been successful in our bid for funding under the Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) scheme, co-funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund in partnership with the Scottish Government and NatureScot.
Our project, ‘Joint Ventures for Scalable Community Benefits from Rewilding’, is one of 27 projects in the first round of funding from this innovative Scottish funding programme. The £194,700 grant, 50% from NatureScot and 50% from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, will fund an 18 month project across the three estates owned by Highlands Rewilding.
The outcome of the project will be a series of investment-ready business plans for community joint ventures. The joint ventures will capitalise on environmental improvements from rewilding, and the valuable ecosystem services they generate. They will be a mechanism for involving more people in nature restoration, boosting the economy, skills development, job creation and cohesion in local communities.
Following our recent publication of our roadmap for community engagement, this project will aim to produce new standards for community engagement and benefits from natural capital projects that are transferrable across the field as a whole.
Calum Brown, Co-chief scientist at Highlands Rewilding said:
“This project will enable us to take a huge step towards our goal of ensuring that rewilding leads to increased community prosperity”.
The first stage of the project will be to recruit 3 roles key to the delivery of the project, a Community Engagement Coordinator, a part-time Project Coordinator and a Marine Rewilding Lead. Keep an eye on our jobs page where the job descriptions will be posted soon.
We will provide updates as the project progresses but get in touch via info@highlandsrewilding.co.uk if you would like to hear more or be involved.
We are also involved as a case study in a second FIRNS project, ‘Community Benefits Standard for the UK Nature Investment Market, developed in Scotland’, working with Deciding Matters and members of the Nature Finance Certification Alliance. The aim of this project is to establish an outline business case for a new UK-wide standard for ensuring that meaningful community benefits are baked into natural capital projects.