Highlands Rewilding Annual Report 25-26

Operations, Monitoring, Research and Storytelling

We are delighted to share our annual report for the Financial Year 2025-2026. With an introduction from our Founder, Jeremy Leggett, an update on our land sales and OSPREY partners, and news of our rewilding operations, monitoring, research and storytelling, we hope you find this report as rewarding to read as it has been for us to write and reflect on the past year.

Introduction from our Founder

I need to introduce our report on the 2025-26 financial year (1st April to 31st March) with a little history. It begins on the last day of the 2022-23 FY, when Highlands Rewilding achieved something momentous. That day, we became the first ever nature investment of the UK’s development bank, then called the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB: now the National Wealth Fund). UKIB loaned us £12 million from the public purse. The purpose was to acquire the Tayvallich estate, a veritable wonderland in terms of readiness for nature recovery and community joint venturing.

It was a risky thing for us to take on. Very. We did so only after deep consultation with our shareholders. That resulted in a clear “fortune favours the brave” mandate from the most experienced of our founding funders. So we took the plunge. Our primary goal was to create space for major private financial institutions to invest further, with equity. It was, and is, a major objective of both the Scottish Government and our embryonic industry to raise such investment.

Without it, nobody will be able to take nature recovery to the national scale needed if we are to reverse biodiversity collapse. Highlands Rewilding tried to lead the way. We hoped, in particular, to attract a pension fund or two to invest. There is no point in having a pension if the future you are retiring into is unlivable.

By the end of the 2024-25 financial year it had become clear that we were “too early”, or so our financial-institution targets told us. Entering the 2025-26 financial year, it was clear we would have to change tack, fast. And so we began a major pivot under fire: a switch to an “asset light” model where we would lease land for nature recovery from landowners other than ourselves. We had to find buyers for our land assets who would hopefully be happy to enter into such partnerships with us. We also had to try and sell all the buildings on the land we owned to local community interests, not to out-of- country second home owners. This quest dominated the past year.

In brief, it ended in success. We sold 83% of the land we bought with the UKIB loan and previous equity we raised to three buyers who we are now happily partnered with, doing what we would have done had we continued owning the land. We sold all 19 homes on this land either to local buyers, or tenants buying their homes, or to “returners” wanting to live in the region they came from, or to rewilding supporters undertaking their own nature-recovery projects. In terms of benefits for nature and local communities, we achieved a far better outcome than the one that would have unfolded under other buyers, had we not acquired Tayvallich.

We finished paying back the loan on 22nd September 2025. It would not be fair to pretend that a successful outcome was plain sailing. It came about with two important caveats. The first involved luck. We could pretend it was easy finding nature-loving landowner partners. It wasn’t. Luck figured large. The second was the stress that our high-wire act inevitably caused in the households of the team members and local community individuals sweating on a good outcome.

Recognising this, the first thing I need to do is express gratitude in the extreme to those who soaked up that stress, alongside me. We achieved a very worthwhile outcome in the end, and I do so desperately hope that all involved agree with me that the reward has been worth the risk and the stress that accompanied it.

The second thing I need to do is to apologise to those investors who advised me to begin selling all the assets the moment we acquired them. Only a minority advised this, but they were right. I and my team reasoned that if we kept the built assets, in particular, we would be able to help change collective corporate thinking on nature recovery by dint of life-changing residential retreat experiences. That didn’t work.

Alongside our debt repayment in 2025-26 we have sought to raise equity from investors other than major financial institutions. This we did, bringing in over £1,800,000 against a target of £1,500,000. This sum will enable us to make good progress with delivering the land management plans we have mapped out for our land-management partners, to develop a sales pipeline for premium carbon (carbon-plus-biodiversity-plus-community-benefit), and to continue vital land and water science data gathering and analysis. You will read about that progress in the pages to come.

We will continue to fundraise until cash flows from natural-capital monetisation kick in on the scale needed to make us self-supporting. How we intend to do that in 2026-27 and beyond involves an innovative new strategy that you will be hearing a lot about in the weeks and months ahead.

But first, let us remember what the Highlands Rewilding team achieved in the field in 2025-26.

Jeremy Leggett

Founder, Highlands Rewilding.