Highlands Rewilding Ltd: How I hope the idea will work
Jeremy Leggett, founder of Highlands Rewilding Ltd, explains how the idea for a new mass-ownership company will work, with the purpose of nature recovery and community prosperity through rewilding taken to scale in the Highlands of Scotland.
There will be four categories of shareholders. The first, at the start, will be the founding funders: high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and impact-investment organisations. These are essentially affluent rewilding advocates of the kind who loaned me the £6 million I needed, alongside my own funds, to start my Bunloit Rewilding Project by buying the Bunloit estate in January and May 2020 and 2021, and the Beldorney estate in May 2021. The second category will be citizen rewilders, investing via crowdfunding. Believing as I do that local communities have to be closely involved in nature recovery, my hope is that the majority will be Scots, and in particular Highland Scots. The third will be the operations team, present and future, which will definitely have a majority of Highland Scots. Fourth, and later, will come the growth funders: founding funders investing more funds, other high-net-worth investors like them, and - if we are successful enough in the interim - socially-progressive financial institutions, including pension funds. All shares will hold the same rights, and the shareholder agreement will stipulate that shareholders agree with the mission of the company and will only sell their shares on to others who agree likewise.
The first land the company will buy and operate is 98% of the 865-acre Beldorney estate in Aberdeenshire, where pasture-dominated terrain is primed for fast nature recovery. I bought this estate in anticipation of the scaling phase of the Bunloit Rewilding Project, and Highlands Rewilding will acquire it as soon as it raises its start-phase capital. With the proceeds of this raise, Highlands Rewilding will create an exemplar of land management for nature recovery, and plant/regenerate a “Forest of Hope” as a legacy of the COP26 Climate Summit. Several neighbouring landowners have told us they are keen to join in this exercise, raising hopes that local-community collaboration can result in a rewilding corridor in the upper Deveron valley.
We will then repeat our model of land management on other tracts of land, aiming for landscape-scale nature-recovery, and allowing growing numbers of Scottish citizen rewilders to invest and co-own rewilding land in their own nation.
Highlands Rewilding Ltd will be building on the start made by Bunloit Rewilding Ltd, another company I founded, which has hired an increasingly expert team to manage the land on the 1,200 acre Bunloit estate in Inverness-shire. Scientific research by this team and its collaborators, in particular from centres of excellence at Scottish universities, is producing results potentially vital to making nature-based solutions investible. This is the case in peatlands, woodlands, and grasslands alike. These learnings from natural-capital verification science, and the team’s expertise, will be tied into Highlands Rewilding Ltd via a framework agreement, hopefully greatly improving its prospects of success.
If the Highlands Rewilding idea works, the value of the shares in the company will rise because of two things. First, management of land for nature recovery will prove profitable, as new policies promised by the Scottish government to tackle climate meltdown and biodiversity collapse begin to take effect, and land-management strategies developed by Bunloit Rewilding and others prove workable. Second, the rapid rise in value of Scottish land in recent years - should it continue, as seems probable - will be connected into the Highlands Rewilding share price via independent valuations of the land. As the asset value of the land increases on the company’s balance sheet, so the share price rises.
The company will hopefully become an attractive vehicle for Scottish people and communities to co-own land, rather than the norm, which is 100% ownership by ultra-rich people, usually absentees. In this way, the hope is that Highlands Rewilding will help redress the socially-divisive inequalities of land ownership in Scotland, whilst ensuring that land is being managed in the interests of future generations.
Shareholders will be able to sell their shares, but only to others prepared to protect the mission of the company far into the future, which includes safeguarding the carbon sequestered, the biodiversity gained, and the rural livelihoods created. In this way, people can earn returns on investment without the company having to sell the land.
The company will be governed by a board to be appointed in the months after the first fundraising round, if it is successful, as is normal with many a start-up company. It will comprise a majority of Highland Scots, at least 50% female, with the younger generations and the workforce well represented. As with other start-up companies, the operations team will report to this board, which will make the big decisions in the light of (but not necessarily according to) the recommendations of the operations team. I will chair this board, to start with, as I have other boards in companies and charities I have founded.
The directors will serve on the understanding that they will become trustees of a charity, The Highlands Rewilding Trust, that will own Highlands Rewilding Ltd, and run it in the future, ten years from now in 2031, or if I die, whichever happens first. This majority of Highlanders on the Trust Board will ensure that the co-ownership and value held by Highlands Rewilding will be for the benefit of Highlands residents long into the future, even if Highland residents are not a majority in the shareholder register.
At the time of writing, early October 2021, the embryonic Highlands Rewilding team has made a terrific start with building a community of founding funders. But we have currently yet to find a crowdfunding platform adventurous enough to help us deliver the citizen rewilder element of our vision. As things stand, we are not set up to navigate regulations on retail fundraising in order to do the crowdfunding ourselves. We are working hard to resolve this potential impasse, talking to all stakeholders who are in a position to help, including the Scottish government. We are confident of doing so.
In the interim, we are building a list of names of people interested in principle in joining our first crowdfunding campaign. Please sign up and consider joining us when we have our citizen-rewilding platform lined up.
Let’s all help nature to recover and communities to prosper through landscape-scale rewilding across the Highlands of Scotland.
Jeremy Leggett