Private Purchase: The Solution to Scotland's Socio- and Ecological Challenges?
Welcome back! For those joining us for the first time, the first blog in this series surveyed the socio- and ecological challenges Scotland faces. The second outlined the criteria solutions would be judged by, and the third discussed the ‘communal’ approach to addressing those challenges.
This week we’ll be digging into the ‘private’ approach, previously defined as any non-communal purchase of land to commit it to nature restoration: that non-communal definition encapsulates philanthropists, returns-centric organisations, and the government. While it might seem arbitrary, the distinction here, between the communal and non-communal, lies on the level of separation between the owner and the area of land concerned — the degrees of separation between the decision-maker and the affected.
It is worth expanding the private approach’s definition, though, to encapsulate non-purchasing arrangements: here existing landowners self-finance projects or collaborate with firms to finance natural capital or nature restoration projects. Examples of this are increasingly common in Scotland. abrdn’s Nature Investment Partnership strategically maps woodland and peatland restoration — funded mainly through the voluntary carbon market’s Woodland and Peatland Codes — onto existing plots of land, collaborating with owners to create a pipeline of projects. Single estates have been pursuing much the same: Corrour, an estate just east of Glencoe, announced a long-term partnership with the University of St. Andrews last month to offset its unavoidable emissions — alongside creating research opportunities for students and staff alike. Ardtornish, an estate on the Morvern peninsula, recently announced a similar agreement with the University of Edinburgh, again looking to offset unavoidable travel-linked emissions — focussing on nature-based, restoration-centric, solutions to facilitate this.
Arrangements to facilitate nature restoration to differing degrees — whether plain woodland planting or long-term, high-integrity, restoration — are, then, diverse. They utilise a range of agreements, whether through service provision or leases, to achieve their aims, and don’t necessarily involve direct purchase of land.1
With this in mind, we will now survey the private approach’s different components — philanthropic, returns-centric, and governmental — and examine each in accordance with the success criteria established in the second post of this series. We’ll also look at the different tools available to further achieve our aims: conservation burdens in particular, but also Highlands Rewilding’s use of its NCIP model. As a reminder, the success criteria are summarised below. Take a note of their numbering as I’ll be referring to these for ease throughout!
Levels of agglomerated and disagglomerated control — the need for a mix of centralised and decentralised control to ensure diverse implementation with overarching goals and oversight.
The need to overcome parcellisation: linking disparate bits of land to facilitate true landscape-scale nature restoration.
Addressing the deep sociological inequities and economic inefficiencies Scotland faces as a result of concentrated land ownership.
Offering credible long-term protection measures of land that is restored, or is on the journey to restoration: offering dynamic organisational structures that mirror the functioning of ecological systems and our uncertain knowledge of them.
Practical scaleability: the viability of financing mechanisms to scale a system of land governance — through acquisition — that adheres to the need for nature restoration.
I’d recommend reading this post in two sittings: start with Approaches, grab a cup of tea or coffee, and then move onto Tools. Enjoy!
Approaches
Philanthropy
This approach is perhaps best encapsulated by the work of Anders and Anne Povlsen. Famously the largest private landowners in the UK, they have bought up parcels of land around Scotland to unapologetically commit them — currently amounting to about 89,000 hectares — to rewilding. Their estates span Sutherland and the Cairngorms — Glenfeshie being the most famous of these. Anders and Anne take inspiration from the work of Doug and Kristine Tompkins — who pretty much birthed the rewilding movement through their large-scale strategic purchases of land across Chile and Argentina. Their efforts, when paired with the commitments received from those countries’ national governments, have resulted in the protection and restoration of nearly six million hectares of land and over twelve million hectares of sea.
We should also, though, consider smaller-scale philanthropic arrangements: individuals, trusts, and charities buying up or already owning estates of varying sizes out of interest in and affinity with nature restoration. Examples of this are numerous: think of the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s expansive reserves across the country, or the RSPB’s flagship estate at Abernethy. While at a reduced scale, this kind of philanthropy is for all intents and purposes similar to that of the Povlsens.
So how does this score on our criteria, relative to the status quo?
Here, this approach scores poorly. Unless government regulation of land use mandates particular restoration outcomes, control would either become overly centralised or remain as it currently is — in the hands of a few individuals and organisations. In a theoretical world where philanthropists like the Povlsens would purchase truly gargantuan swathes of the country, central oversight, given it would be in the hands of a single organisation, would strengthen. But disagglomeration would fall victim to this: the entire system contingent on a few owners — a few nodes, points of failure. Local agency is thereby similarly reduced.
If scaled significantly, parcellisation would noticeably reduce. It would become easier to coordinate and plan large-scale restoration projects, and to provide enough space for the reintroduction of range-extensive species — carnivores in particular. In the scenario of land ownership distribution remaining equal but estates being bought up by a variety of green-tinged philanthropists, it is foreseeable that the problems posed by parcellisation would be allayed given obvious overlap in values: practical barriers in coordination, though, would remain.
This is where this approach scores rather poorly. It would further cement centuries of historical inequity, concentrating ownership and tightening control over the outcomes of communities located on the land that is owned. No nominal community engagement or participation scheme can mitigate this.
Here, it is dependant on a number of interdependent factors. If conservation burdens are judiciously used and the articles of association or trust deeds that incorporate philanthropists’ vassal organisations are designed carefully to incorporate inclinations for restoration and conservation, land could be committed to long-term protection. Again, though, as with criteria one — the points of failure are too few to allay fears of that protection’s integrity. Just to note, we’ll be examining conservation burdens specifically towards the end of the post.
In a scenario wherein philanthropists have unlimited capital to commit to nature restoration, this approach would score well. With a lesser need to manage landholdings for commercial returns, strategic goals can be prioritised. But considering only 6% of UK and 2% of global philanthropy relates to conservation and the environment, that supposed unlimited capital pool is in reality fairly finite.
Returns-Centric
This approach can be best defined as managing land primarily for positive commercial outcomes — while partly keeping the needs of and for nature restoration in mind. Gresham House is a prominent example: now being one of Scotland’s largest landowners through a network of limited partnerships that they have established. Much of these landholdings are committed to commercial forestry — hardly a boon for the natural world with its monocrop spruce-coated hillsides. Another prominent and more recent example is that of abrdn’s Nature Investment Partnership, which as previously mentioned collaborates with existing landowners to plant Woodland Code-compliant woodland and restore Peatland Code-compliant peatland for the purposes of carbon sequestration.2 abrdn are currently in the process of raising capital to fund the expansion of this project. One last useful example is Oxygen Conservation, a company centred on directly acquiring and restoring plots of land themselves. Funded primarily by their parent company Oxygen House Group, their model similarly revolves around Code-validated carbon credits. Their landholdings are for the most part located in England, but they do own sizeable estates in Glen Lednock and at Langholm Moor.
Before evaluating the efficacy of this approach, it would be worth mentioning briefly why these commercial models tend to focus on sales in the voluntary carbon market. Funding nature restoration commercially is at present fairly nascent. Equivalent biodiversity credits don’t exactly have a buyer — they don’t have an established pool of demand to access. Measuring societal dependencies on the natural world, whether that be corporate or governmental, has yet to be fully monetised. This is particularly the case for rural restoration, which offers less of a concrete benefit when compared to nature-as-infrastructure projects nearer to densely inhabited areas. The Scottish government, though, is developing an Ecosystem Restoration Code in partnership with CreditNature, whose NARIA framework and Ecosystem Integrity Index mirror the makeup of healthy ecologies. This may well form the basis of a future Scottish voluntary biodiversity credit market, and could link to the country’s expected Biodiversity Net Gain equivalent.
All this aside, and keeping in mind that restoration finance models are not the focus of this blog series, the key takeaway is simply that nature markets are as yet poorly developed: that means that restoration projects are presently heavily carbon-focussed — a similarly nascent yet more established model. Restoration for restoration’s sake, as an extra criterion, then, suffers in the returns-centric approach.
So how do these diverse returns-centric approaches stack up when judged by our five criteria?
Again, this approach scores poorly on the necessary balance between agglomerated and disagglomerated control. For the most part, existing landownership distribution will remain equal, and in the absence of top-down government mandates on land use decisions would remain entirely in the hands of the few. Levels of disagglomeration, too, are minimal, there being little diversity in ownership type and no central body overseeing outcomes.
Little would change: existing levels of parcellisation would likely be maintained, and given the diverse funding models used and thereby outcomes desired, coordinating restoration projects at scale between landowners would be tricky.
As with philanthropy, a returns-centric approach scores poorly. Existing landownership distribution would remain equal at best, and possibly worsen. It really is not a valid way forward, and no nominal community engagement or participation scheme can mitigate this.
Long-term protection measures for sites that don’t exhibit strong or anticipated strong ecological integrity — in the form of Woodland and Peatland Code-centred methodologies — are not, continued carbon sequestration aside, as important. That said, conservation burdens can contribute to durability, depending on their exact provisions. And if financing mechanisms for nature restoration do mature, they can ensure that positive outcomes are locked in for some time (more on conservation burdens later in the post!).
This approach, disregarding the fact that it isn’t exactly rewilding-centric, does have the greatest potential to scale. This is particularly the case if leasehold and management agreements are pursued, as direct purchasing faces the basic roadblock of large plots entering the market and changing hands infrequently.
Government
The Scottish Government, through Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), is the country’s largest landowner: holding about 9% of its territory for diverse management. Much of it is on a commercial basis, with forestry destined for the timber industry. As discussed in a previous post, FLS recently acquired Glen Prosen, an estate in Angus that it intends to manage for nature restoration outcomes — linking it to already planned nature networks in the Cairngorms just north of the site.
Exact financing mechanisms aside, let’s set up a theoretical scenario wherein the government would decide to strategically purchase vast swathes of land and commit it to restoration — this is often seen as a desirable way forward by many, and is exemplified by recent movements in Denmark: the central government there will buy back 10% of currently cultivated marginal land from farmers, committing it to either reforestation or other nature-friendly management to the tune of 390,000 hectares. A similar scheme in Scotland would be groundbreaking, or rather ground-restoring — but how would it stack up on our criteria?
The degree of agglomeration and central oversight is severe: this would enable swift and decisive action, but contains little redundancy in the system. Limited redundancy means that should dictated action be ineffective or less than ideal, failure or suboptimal outcomes would be widespread. Disagglomeration, of course, is the victim in all this.
Parcellisation, if land purchases are strategic, would be overcome entirely. Disparate plots would be linked up and managed centrally, overcoming management inefficiencies and ensuring economies of scale.
This is tricky. Is centralised ownership and control acceptable if that ownership and control is democratically mandated? Do national elections suffice as a mandate for mass land acquisition and control? This proposition is difficult — primarily because national democracy in no way relates to local democracy; to those actually affected by land-use decisions. As mentioned elsewhere, the distinction between communal and non-communal approaches is the removal from local contexts: this approach is entirely removed from local contexts — prioritising national interest above all else.3
Excessive control in the hands of a few individuals, supplanted by excessive control in the hands of a single government at the whims of shifting public opinion, is not exactly conducive with long-term commitments to nature restoration. If an election result or a simple shift in polling changes policy, this approach cannot be considered durable.
Edit (22/01/2025): A practical example might be of use here. The extraordinary success of Doug and Kristine Tompkins in assembling a series of national parks throughout Chile — amounting to around 4 million hectares of land — rests on a model that presumes continued state enthusiasm for nature conservation as a cause. Of those 4 million hectares, 520,000 were donated directly by the Tompkins’. The rest was matched by the Chilean national government. That matched land (albeit without precedent) could at any point have its designation as parkland removed — only the 520,000 donated via a modal donation mechanism (a private contractual agreement) would have to be returned, and only that portion (presuming Rewilding Chile’s, the successor organisation of Tompkins Conservation in the country, integrity) would remain protected. At a time of global upheaval and disregard for established norms, reversals such as this aren’t unimaginable — particularly in the context of Chile’s ongoing constitutional instability and neighbouring Argentina’s (where the Tompkins’ successfully pursued a similar model) political turbulence. The same applies even to private law mechanisms: sovereign states, if they were so inclined, could override and rewrite applicable rules.
In theory, the government would have the ability to purchase large swathes of land. Financing restoration work itself is another story, but given borrowing could be offset by acquired asset values, comprehensive purchases wouldn’t prove too difficult. The biggest roadblock, here, would be the fact that the Scottish Government could not actually borrow enough to do this — it being a limited devolved competence — and doesn’t otherwise have sufficient funding.
It is worth noting alternative models for government intervention. Other than direct prohibition of particular harmful activities through, say, the Wildlife and Countryside Act or the more recent Wildlife Management and Muir Burn Bill, positive financial incentives can be offered too. Commercial forestry is currently subsidised in the form of grant funding, and farming is most obviously subsidised through Scotland’s CAP successor. A transition for both of these mechanisms to ones that support nature restoration and nature-friendly farming or land conversion — for the latter, refer to England’s ELM Landscape Recovery Scheme — would do plenty to incentivise existing landowners to act appropriately without the need for direct land purchases.
Tools
Conservation Burdens
One tool this set of approaches relies heavily upon is conservation burdens — or covenants, as they are referred to in England. I feel it is worth elaborating on these, although I am by no means qualified to do so at length. Should any reader feel I get something wrong, please do correct me!
Conservation burdens are agreements between a landowner (generally a freeholder, although in some cases a leaseholder too) and a responsible body for a specific conservation outcome. Responsible bodies are registered third-party organisations whose activities predominantly lie within the matters the burdens relate to — in our case conservation and nature restoration. Burdens can last any agreed length of time (including in perpetuity) and require the landowner to conserve or engage in behaviour that conserves the natural environment. These obligations also carry over to future landowners, being deed rather than owner-specific. Burdens can be as prescriptive and broad brush as the landowner and responsible body would jointly like them to be: they could, for example specify how land should be managed, not just what it should be managed for (i.e. the preservation of a particular patch of woodland).
Scepticism of whether conservation burdens can act as a tool to truly address our socio- and ecological challenges is well grounded. They are fundamentally derived from the land ownership context we inhabit: they exist because private landownership exists, and they exist because private landowners are almost solely able to dictate the outcomes of conservation and restoration on their specific bits of land.4 Burdens are a tool that reflect this dynamic: they are not a mechanism we would come up with were we designing a system of land ownership or land management from scratch. There is a moral hazard, then, in claiming that conservation burdens effectively allay the drawbacks of current land ownership systems — a form of green- and whitewashing.
Other practical difficulties with burdens exist too. They concern specific areas of land, and given the infinitely customisable nature of the agreements that could be made between landowners and responsible bodies, there is no guarantee of effectively coordinating restoration on a true landscape-scale. Enforcement of breaches of these agreements, too, relies heavily on courts’ capacity to hear these: hardly a guarantee in the currently cash-strapped judiciary. They also rely on responsible bodies’ willingness and ongoing capacity to challenge breaches from the outset.
One other important point to note is that any future piece of legislation could change the terms conservation burdens are governed under. This is the weakness with the static nature of this instrument, as I have referred to previously. It is better to place emphasis on developing supportive, dynamic, community-driven governance structures that place implicit social value on their surrounding natural landscapes than it is to rely on on-paper instruments requiring legal enforcement to have any practical meaning. Do burdens foster these supportive structures? Not in isolation — so they cannot be relied upon in that way nor treated accordingly.
Edit (22/01/2025): One previously unmentioned consideration is that conservation burdens fundamentally don’t address the need to de-concentrate landownership: they (partly) fulfil ecological objectives only by slotting into, and thereby reinforcing, existing landownership structures.
NCIP
I’ve been asked to speak more specifically about this: Highlands Rewilding’s Nature and Community in Perpetuity model. For context: this is an approach currently taken by Highlands Rewilding, wherein they are selling, and plan to sell, some their landholdings off to bodies that adhere to certain standards —see those via the hyperlink above. The idea, more generally, is that land should be sold off to bodies that guarantee its continued restoration and subsequent conservation. This was the case for the Barrahormid Trust, which bought a chunk of the Tayvallich estate: their trust deed guarantees management for positive nature outcomes.
The sale to the Barrahormid Trust, and others currently planned, seem distressed. They are more a result of the need to repay the UK Infrastructure Bank’s — now the National Wealth Fund’s — £12 million loan that funded the initial purchase of Tayvallich in 2023 than they are a coordinated activity to ensure land is conserved in perpetuity. It is a response to a specific, localised, problem rather than a solution to Scotland’s broader challenges. Buying up a bunch of land and then selling it off to willing buyers who wish to lock it into a particular kind of land use is an inefficient way to go about things, and is hardly a winning business model either.
One other point to consider is that sales to trusts or community bodies are hardly a silver bullet. Problems previously discussed remain. For trusts, refer to the above section on philanthropy. For community bodies, refer to the third post in this series. And should it be another kind of organisation, likely refer to the above section on returns-centric bodies.
Conclusion
I’ll end this post with a prelude to next week’s edition. All the solutions discussed thus far, while seeming responses to Scotland’s — and the world’s — socio- and ecological challenges, tend to fit within the frameworks that encourage those challenges’ emergence in the first place. Solutions emphasise not just the idea of private landownership — but the idea that land can be owned and exploited in the first place. They reinforce the dynamics of overly- and underly-centralised control that led us to where we are; they fail to provide a roadmap to an alternative — to a better — future. This is particularly the case with the financing mechanisms used to fund nature restoration. The reason I place little emphasis on these is because underlying structures need fixed first: those who decide what happens, and decide how that happens, must change before those very power dynamics are baked into what would simply become a nature restoration-centric form of land use.5
I will be discussing this and more in the next two posts, where I’ll be proposing an alternative solution that intends to overcome these challenges. Do stay tuned.
Note: I am aware that examining approaches in isolation is somewhat reductive. Examining them in combination, though, would lengthen an already lengthy exercise in evaluating their efficacy. As always, I would be happy to chat more about all this with anyone who’s interested!
Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.
Covering the full breadth of potential arrangements would take a while. You can refer to some of the Scottish Land Commission’s work on this here if you’re interested in some further reading.
This non-purchasing model aims to reduce initial capital expenditure and the ongoing costs of unrelated land management. See here for more reading on this.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing: systematically planning nature restoration isn’t always conducive with local interests — a rewiggled river might, for example, suit one community’s flood mitigation plans but compromise their neighbour’s farmland.
Edit (14/01/2025): To push back against this a little: landowners’ rights are not absolute, being hemmed in by planning and environmental regulations. In the ecological sense, though, they are — a human owner, through their presumptive rights and ability to implement those, can solely dictate the biophysical outcomes of ‘their’ bit of this planet.
Edit (12/01/2025): To mitigate this point slightly, social, economic, and environmental incentives do matter — a lot! In the case of land, individuals and organisations tend to only decide to own it and the assets thereon because of the incentives that lead them that way in the first place — whether that be social/cultural desire and related status or economic drivers (e.g. potential yields from commercial forestry). Ownership is not a static, absolute, decision: it is positioned and situated in a broader context.
Importantly, though, incentives change. Natural capital might be highly prized in economic terms one decade or one century, but the proceeding decade or century might tend a different direction — relying on incentives alone, then, is irresponsible, whether they are introduced and enforced by the market, government regulation, or diktat. Durable ownership and formalised governance structures that prioritise a particular kind of land use are thereby a necessity.
In addition to this, the way incentives are perceived vary depending on the structures that do the perceiving. An unrestricted private limited company might seek to prioritise a particular kind of nature restoration in response to a particular kind of biodiversity credit on sale (think habitat banks in response to England’s BNG), while a trust with particular provisions in its deed might approach matters more carefully and comprehensively — taking non-market, or non-regulatory, holistic indicators into account.