Highlands Rewilding Founder, Dr Jeremy Leggett, wins $500,000 Blue Planet Prize
Our founder and CEO Jeremy Leggett has been awarded the 2025 Blue Planet Prize, and its half million USD prize money. This is one of the two top environmental prizes in the world.
Dr Jeremy Leggett at Bunloit rewilding estate
Past winners have included Jim Hansen, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and James Lovelock. Jeremy has won the award for his work over the years on carbon, solar and most recently nature. He will be injecting all the prize money into Highlands Rewilding and our ongoing efforts to help scale nature recovery to the extent needed if global biodiversity collapse is to be reversed. He will be inviting high net-worth individuals, family offices and progressive organisations to join him.
The team at Highlands Rewilding, already delighted with the reception of their nature-recovery data and science work by stakeholders, is thrilled by this further evidence of their impact during five years of hard work on the frontier.
I feel completely humbled by this award. I surely did not win it on my own. Any progress I have made on carbon would have been impossible without the star campaigners and analysts I had the privilege of working with at Greenpeace and Carbon Tracker, and our advisors. Any solar successes could not even have been dreamt of without the brilliant alumni of Solarcentury and SolarAid, and our advisors, and funders. And these last five years on the nature-recovery frontier little would have been achieved without the current team and alumni of Highlands Rewilding, our advisors, our local community partners, the conservationist pioneers who inspired us and the many investors who have backed our vision of a breakthrough in helping to reverse biodiversity collapse whilst advancing community prosperity. That vision as yet remains unfulfilled, and that is why all the prize money will be injected into Highlands Rewilding as we endeavour to create a rallying point for hope.
At Solarcentury and SolarAid we did succeed—many of us, collectively, ultimately—in helping engineer the take-off of a market vital to a liveable future. I will be hoping that the entirely unforeseen advent of the Blue Planet Prize will increase the chances of a second such collective achievement, and I extend my deepest gratitude to all the wonderful people who have brought that prospect into the realm of the possible.
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