We know that rewilding is creating jobs, reducing flooding, and allowing wildlife and ecosystems to flourish. The nature-positive, hopeful future we are building is shaped by the choices our team are making on the ground, below the waves, across pastures and in our woodlands. Your support helps us to record and restore the nature around us and our team have sent us short insights into some of the work we are currently carrying out across our rewilding sites.

Beneath the calm waters of Argyll’s sea lochs lies one of Scotland’s most important, and least visible, ecosystems: seagrass meadows. These flowering plants form underwater forests that support fish, protect coastlines, and store carbon for thousands of years. In this blog, our Marine Lead, Dr David Smyth, looks at the results from a recent survey of Tayvallich’s very own seagrass meadow.

NHK WORLD JAPAN has broadcast this year’s edition of Our Blue Planet: The Path of Restoration to Save the Earth, a 30-minute programme showcasing the work of Professor Robert Jackson and Dr Jeremy Leggett – exploring the science, leadership and long-term thinking needed to address climate change and biodiversity loss.

Works have begun this month to improve 3 kilometres of the popular Great Glen Way route, bringing the path off-road and into the varied habitats of Bunloit estate.  

The 75-mile route linking Fort William and Inverness passes directly through Bunloit, but is almost entirely on the road, providing very little opportunity to experience the wonderful nature of the area. We are thrilled to now be able to help improve access through our estate, helping locals and long-distance users alike avoid traffic and experience Bunloit’s natural woodland and diverse rewilding landscapes. 

By Dr Hannah Rudman, Director of Development and Policy & Helen Avery, Non-executive Director at Highlands Rewilding, and Director of Nature Programmes and GFI Hive.

As of November 2025, the TNFD has 733 early adopters – and Highlands Rewilding is delighted to be a part of this growing global momentum, one of only two Scottish organisations to be adopters.

An important aspect of our work at the Tayvallich Estate in Argyll is to extend the rare temperate rainforest. To help us further develop our understanding of these special habitats, we recently had two MSc students working on their dissertation projects on different aspects of these woodlands. These projects were intended to help reveal the ecological health of different areas of woodland, how that relates to characteristics of the trees and their surrounding environment, and how detectable those characteristics are from different data sources. Ultimately, these findings will help us to restore more rainforest to higher ecological standards, on Tayvallich estate and beyond. 

Why the non-native Sika deer may become the new Monarch of the Glen. Highlands Rewilding publishes new research warning that current deer management could unintentionally help non-native Sika deer to dominate some Scottish landscapes. In this blog, we detail how and why.

Highlands Rewilding leads a ground-breaking step forward in our nascent market, and other good news.

In London yesterday one of the largest underwriting agencies in the world, DUAL group, launched something completely new - a first of its kind insurance policy in the UK with Highlands Rewilding.

This week we took what we hope will be a highly significant step towards helping make nature an asset class. 

Jeremy Leggett, Highlands Rewilding’s Founder and CEO has recently been awarded the Blue Planet Prize for his lifetime contributions to combatting climate change. Below is the white paper version of his Blue Planet Commemorative Lecture, delivered yesterday in Tokyo. It is distillation of experience from his 40 years of science-based campaigning, in both the NGO and business worlds, and very much written for our times. We hope you will find it germane, interesting, and (net) encouraging.

As Highland Rewilding CEO Jeremy Leggett receives the Blue Planet Prize in Tokyo this week, this video, based on his speech, explores the strong connection between nature recovery, strengthening nature-based economies and reducing inequality, through the Nature Prosperity Pump.

By restoring forests, pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it into timber-rich affordable homes, this approach can create sustainable jobs, help combat the climate and biodiversity crises, reduce inequality and, Leggett argues, strengthen democracy itself.

We are delighted to have been included in the Blue Earth list of the 100 top companies "transforming the way the world works.” This “BE 100” list was drawn up from thousands of candidates by a review panel consisting of Blue Earth partners including HSBC and Innovate UK, and a panel of venture capital companies.

Highlands Rewilding has lodged a formal objection to the proposed Glen Earrach pumped-storage hydro scheme at Loch Ness.

We have raised serious concerns about the impact of Loch Ness becoming artificially tidal. The Glen Earrach project, along with one existing scheme (Foyers Pumped storage hydropower scheme) and two others consented/proposed, will be moving huge volumes of water, causing regular fluctuations of over half a metre. This could cause potentially devastating biodiversity loss across the loch, and our objection highlights under-sampling in the developer’s surveys, evidence from eDNA of wider invertebrate communities, and potential impacts on blanket bog, ancient woodland and Loch nam Breac Dearga.

This blog also contains useful links to find out more information about the Glen Earrach Energy Project.

Following our last investment update, many of you got in touch to express your disappointment that we were unable to receive new investments during this round of under £50K. We have listened, and this week we are delighted to share that we are collaborating with Green Angel Ventures, to enable investments from as low as £5K. Their specialist angel network, the Green Angel Syndicate, are considering a collective investment in Highlands Rewilding, and will be undertaking their own independent due diligence.

This is a unique chance to be part of a powerful collective effort, helping us advance Highlands Rewilding’s mission while joining a community of investors who care as deeply as we do about the future of our land and our planet.

I am happy to report that we have been sailing well of late in the strong headwinds that have been facing us on the frontier of the embryonic nature-recovery market.

This week, Nature30 has been launched by the Scottish Government and NatureScot (replacing the previous, unwieldy term of Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs).

It's encouraging to see progress being made on this key target, and we’re proud to have been part of shaping this important process. We’ll continue to engage with Nature30 as it develops, and hope that it grows to reflect the range of conservation activities occurring across Scotland.

Peatlands cover just 3% of Earth but store 30% of the world's soil carbon – that’s twice as much as all forests combined. These ancient bogs might just be our best natural ally in fighting climate change.

At Bunloit estate, we are restoring 8,000-year-old peatland that's been degraded by decades of commercial forestry, releasing approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.

This is how.

Highlands Rewilding recently completed a ground-breaking project that explored how “Community Joint Ventures” (CJVs) can link local people with the benefits of nature recovery. Focusing on the estates we manage and aiming to co-develop business plans for community-led ventures that support or benefit from rewilding, these ventures were intended not only to be beneficial in their own right, but also to provide useful examples for others to build on, encouraging the close involvement of local people in land management and its benefits more generally.

Today we are publishing our final project report to present what we’ve found, achieved and learned!

Our founder and CEO Jeremy Leggett has been awarded one of the world’s two top environmental prizes and its half million USD prize money. 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.

We recently completed our fifth year on the frontier of the nature recovery market. It has proved to be a rockier frontier than we anticipated at the outset, for us and others seeking to make this vital market work. But we are holding the fort, and continue to have high hopes both that a thriving nature-recovery market will emerge in Scotland, and that Highlands Rewilding will be able to help lead it towards the exponential growth that will be needed if we are to hit necessarily ambitious government targets on biodiversity and carbon.