The Scotsman: How a mass-ownership company can help communities prosper, boost nature recovery and tackle climate change
Jeremy recently wrote an article for The Scotsman on land reform and rewilding. You can read the full and original article here.
Can land reform and nature restoration go hand-in-hand? Jeremy Leggett, founder and chief executive of Highlands Rewilding, insists they can.
By Jeremy Leggett
Published in the Scotsman on 18th Jan 2024, 04:55 GMT
Jeremy Legget at Bunloit Bunloit. Photography: Nicholas J.R. White
Land reform in Scotland is long overdue. So too is nature recovery. We have one of the most nature-impoverished landscapes in Europe. Can land reform and nature recovery make functional marriage partners? I believe so.
Where land comes into local community ownership, it tends to be managed with nature recovery front of mind. The Langholm community is a good example of this. But there are relatively few examples of such community ownership.
Where communities are unable or collectively disinclined to own land as it becomes available, alternatives include a new kind of company: one with mass ownership that manages land for nature recovery and community prosperity using funds from private, public and philanthropic investors. The mass owners include local community members, the workforce on the land is dominated by people living locally and local communities have agency in the strategy and operations of the company.
Our mass ownership involves 809 people and organisations, 40 per cent of them living in Scotland, and nearly five per cent in the communities where we work. In our current workforce of 23, 15 live in the communities.
The community where we are making most progress at present is Tayvallich. Here our synergy with the local community is captured in a written agreement that has 24 action items. One of these is the creation of a local management board that co-ordinates the management of the land the company owns – the 3,000-acre Tayvallich estate – with community aspirations and plans. It has three company representatives and seven community representatives.
This board has considerable soft power. The hard power (ie legal responsibilities) lies with the main board of the company, which consists of six people with sufficient business experience to give investors the confidence they seek. But the key dynamic in the interaction between the two boards is that the main company board would not dream of pushing through a strategy that did not have strong majority support in the local estate management board.
The point about investor confidence is crucial. The Scottish Government is of the view that tens of billions of pounds in investment will be needed from private financial institutions – pension funds, insurance companies, asset-management companies and the like – if they are to hit their necessarily ambitious targets for carbon emissions-cuts and biodiversity uplift.
But private financial institutions are holding back, fearing that the returns they could expect would not meet their fiduciary responsibilities to their own investors. This does rather raise the prospect of a laughable epitaph for humankind: we wanted to save the planet but the financial returns weren’t high enough. We cannot let that ridiculous scenario unfold.
In 2024, Highlands Rewilding will be aiming for an acid test of what business people call “investability”. At the heart of our pitch to private financial institutions will be a quid-pro-quo with the communities where we work: we promise to deliver on community prosperity, and the community helps us deliver the ethical levels of profitability we need to succeed in the embryonic nature-recovery market. As part of this promise, the company will soon complete the sale of land to the Tayvallich community for affordable housing. There will be more such sales. With a bit of luck many of the occupants of the housing will have jobs in nature recovery with Highlands Rewilding. And so will the marriage thrive, helping in local and national efforts to craft a liveable future as it does so.
Other recent Highlands Rewilding articles in the Scotsman: