IN May, Highlands Rewilding announced an unprecedented project that guarantees a large tract of land will be used only for the restoration of nature and the growth of community, essentially forever. This is possible when a buyer of Highlands Rewilding land forms a charity that pledges so to do. Highlands Rewilding then manages the land to ensure this happens, sharing proceeds from natural-capital monetisation with the charity. The land in question was on the Tayvallich estate in Argyll, and the buyer was the Barrahormid Trust.
Now Highlands Rewilding is seeking to replicate this model, dubbed the Nature and Community In Perpetuity (NCIP) model, on other land that they currently own. They have partnered with estate agency Strutt and Parker, a subsidiary of the international banking group BNP Paribas, to cast a wide net in the search for buyers.
Highlands Rewilding is doing so in a race against time, because they need to pay back loans they took out to buy the land by the end of January. This they plan to do both by raising equity and selling land to NCIP buyers. They are currently exploring equity investment with 26 potential investors: financial institutions, family offices, and companies, only a few of which Highlands Rewilding needs to invest if it is to enter 2025 with wind in its sails. But they do so in an embryonic nature recovery market that has been slow to take off, mainly because governments have been slow in delivering on their ambitious commitments to reverse global biodiversity collapse, made in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework treaty.
Highlands Rewilding founder and CEO Jeremy Leggett said: “The NCIP model has immense potential, both for environmental and social benefits and the essential mission to make nature recovery ethically profitable. We are finding that it tends to be popular among community members, government, and investors alike. If we can make it work, we will be able to hold the fort until governments catch up with their biodiversity promises by putting policies in place capable of kick-starting the market. Our dream is to be the first nature-recovery company to break through to scale on the frontier of the nascent nature-recovery market, and many of our investors – present and potential – tell us that the best way to do this is to be the asset-lite data-rich company that uptake of the NCIP model will create.”
Details of the land on offer will be made available on 1st October. Bids have to be in by 10th December.
Leggett added: “We consciously embarked on a risky debt-dependent path in trying to achieve our market breakthrough, with the agreement of our lead investors, because there is another race-against-time involved in our project: humankind’s race to reverse global biodiversity collapse. This and the closely related issue of climate meltdown are existential threats to a liveable future on this planet, and the clock is ticking loudly.”
