Highlands Rewilding: What Next? A message from the board

As you know, this summer and autumn we have been trying to bring the first private institutional capital into the nascent nature-recovery market in Scotland. In trying to accelerate the kick-starting of this market, we have been much motivated by our belief that the threat of biodiversity collapse is existential, that time is running out in efforts to reverse it, and that doing so cannot happen without significant investment of private institutional capital.

We have had 47 conversations with private financial institutions. We have had surprisingly little material pushback on the numbers and assumptions in the business plan we presented to them. We have argued that we can provide levels of profitability acceptable to pension funds, and that our assumptions about community-centred natural-capital monetisation are conservative. Even under deep scrutiny by analysts this has not generally been problematic. The number one problem has been the absence of policy. One by one FIs have been telling us that without government policy in place for biodiversity and nature markets, they will not be able to get our proposal past their investment committees. The biggest risk we have taken is our effort to get one or two of them over this hurdle in Scotland, absent policy. We knew it was risky, and our risk taking has not paid off in 2024.

The Scottish Government’s Natural Capital Market Framework was finally published on 5th November, fully two years after the Montreal biodiversity summit where the world’s governments agreed to stop biodiversity collapse by 2030. It should now belatedly help in addressing investors’ concerns about absence of policy. Crucially, it sets out market-building measures to be instigated within 2025 that stand to help frontier nature-recovery developers like Highlands Rewilding and the communities wherein we work. (Declaration of interest: Jeremy served on the advisory group set up by the Scottish Government in developing the framework, the only industry voice on that group).

So we are now going to take a deep breath, step sideways, and prepare a revised business plan built around the framework. We will also be helped by the UK Government’s publication on 15th November of Principles to guide voluntary carbon and nature market integrity. We will pitch it to FIs again, especially those who invited us to come back when policy is clearer, but also cast our net wider to include other kinds of organisations and individuals.

We intend our campaign to extend from February into May. We face many moving parts as things stand, including on elite help with our new campaign, on loan repayment-plan details, on potential lands sales for lease-back, and on exactly how we intend to evolve and develop the close collaborations we have underway in the local communities wherein we work. All these things will be clearer by January, and we will report again then, in more detail. For the moment we simply want to communicate the extension of our fundraising into 2025 with the agreement of our lenders, and our belief as a board that this second time around (Round 3b as we shall call it) our chances will be much better than in Round 3a.

Some potential investors have suggested to us that we should cut our costs in preparing the revised plan. We have resisted this, because most of our costs are in headcount, and our team is clearly our biggest asset (Highlands Rewilding being a community-centred knowledge and data company, essentially). Cutting our team - which is stretched skinny as it is - would risk fatally impairing our ability to continue the critically-acclaimed frontier work we have underway. That ground-breaking work on natural-capital science helps to lay the foundations for the functional market that must come if biodiversity collapse is to be reversed. Our fourth Natural Capital Report will be published on 16th December. Our website, meanwhile, is rich with information and mini-films about this work.

So in summary, over December and the new year “break" we will be drawing up a new plan, resilient Highlanders that we are. And in February we will begin pitching it to investors again. You may have heard the story of Robert the Bruce. It involves Scots failing in a project of national importance, sitting in a cave being inspired by a bit of biodiversity, trying again, and succeeding. That’s what we are going to do.

We thank you as ever for your support, and patience.

The Highlands Rewilding Board