Making the land pay isn’t all about the balance sheet – enjoyment of natural beauty has its own value

Thomas Macdonell on an estate owner’s plan to preserve wild areas

Our natural capital is rightfully seen as an asset for the whole country. Successive government strategies on biodiversity have recognised the benefits for Scotland of a diverse natural environment, and the contribution it can make to sustainable economic growth. But reaching biodiversity nirvana is a complex and very long journey.

Furthermore, the actions needed to achieve such a goal are often met with scepticism or worse, hostility.

For Scotland’s estates and great swathes of our majestic countryside, the game changer in terms of their environmental protection was Natura 2000. This ecological network of protected areas provided the rigour needed for the EU’S Habitats Directive, under which Special Areas of Conservation were established, providing teeth for local

environmental laws, forcing many landowners to change their mindset towards their land holdings and how they were managed.

For some estates too, there were additional cost pressures. Putting in place new land management expertise and implementing habitat monitoring procedures was entirely new, not necessarily straightforward and often unwanted.

Many estates had previously diversified to try to make the land ‘pay’, with decisions commonly based around maximising returns from existing government subsidy frameworks, such as those for renewable energy.

Even then, most estates lose money – as do ours, for the time being at least. Sometimes, however, when onlookers focus on profit and loss as prime motivators, they find it is hard to credit the fact that there are those

who buy land simply because nature is their passion and natural beauty has its own value.

The introduction of Natura 2000, in fact, opened the way for new types of owners to step forward, step up and start building new businesses around the natural capital.

Anders Holch Povlsen bought Glenfeshie in the Cairngorms in 2006. Since then he has continued to buy designated sites where there is little obvious commercial opportunity, along with the lands connecting them to create the ability to approach environmental rehabilitation on a landscape scale.

His vision, which is being implemented by Wildland Limited, is for developing and nurturing Scotland’s most special habitats and protecting its most valuable landscapes.

At Glenfeshie, a decade after tak-

ing charge, deer numbers have been reduced to levels that are more in balance with the land’s capacity to support them, and new trees emerge every year. Instead of being browsed, they are allowed to gain a foothold, with new Scots pine, birch and juniper thriving.

Hopefully soon, through the Cairngorms Connect project, Glenfeshie’s expanding ecosystem will eventually link with Abernethy Forest, where the RSPB has successfully created an area where rare birds are now returning in ever greater numbers.

But conservation capital simply isn’t sustainable unless it involves people and delivers the health, wellbeing and economic benefits that the Scottish Government quite rightly aspires to in its policy ambitions. Mr Povlsen’s vision is about people and place too. For Wildland Limited,