The road ahead: Our vision for May 2025
A company update from the Highlands Rewilding Board
Let us begin the update we promised you last month with a vision of what we aim to achieve by May this year. If we can succeed, we will have created an island of hope in a world far more febrile and strange than we could have imagined when we started the Highlands Rewilding project five years ago. In order to keep that hope alive, we will have to adapt to circumstances as we find them, and regroup. We will need to continue fighting hard for what we believe in, where so many others around us seem to be bending the knee to despoilers of nature.
By May this year, we aim to:
1. Raise at least £5m in a new fundraising round, from February through to April. Our updated business plan is nearly ready. It reflects fresh policy insights, new and positive market indicators, and builds on lessons learned from 2024.
2. Sell some of our land and property in order to clear the loans we took out in 2023, but we will fight to keep as much as we can, and we will make every effort to sell to buyers who want to partner with HRL and our team in managing the land, including our community-centred way of operating. We will begin a sales campaign in February, targeting completions by May.
3. Strike a balance in our twin track of fundraising and asset sales that will allow us to retain key natural assets that can serve as exemplar “outdoor laboratories” for community-centred nature recovery and natural capital income generation. The more we raise, the more assets we can keep – but we will be relaxed about the need to own assets because of the next element of the vision.
4. Position ourselves for growth as a data-led nature-recovery service provider. This “asset-lite” model will allow us to scale by offering services to landowners of all kinds, leveraging our strengths in data, science, and nature management, captured well in our recently published Fourth Annual Natural Capital Report.
That, then, is the vision for the next half year. It is a less ambitious vision than the one we pursued last year. But then, the world of 2025 inescapably offers us less scope for ambition.
Let us now examine the implications for each of the four elements.
1. The new fundraising round.
Who we’re targeting: We will have less emphasis on the big financial institutions, who are still learning about emerging nature markets, and more on proven supporters of the kind with whom we raised £11 million in 2022-23: family offices, high net-worth individuals, progressive investment companies with new nature funds and government pension schemes and a few foundations. We know that there are people and organisations out there who want to invest in a liveable future still. Sadly, we have also discovered, on our frontier, that the investment committees of most financial institutions, and the credit committees of most banks, are not yet among them.
(Not) Crowdfunding: We have been asked by many whether we will run a second crowdfunding round, building on the big success of the first. However, the immense calls that round made on the bandwidth of the company make a repeat crowdfunding round and expanding our shareholder base unfeasible in the first half of 2025. We will aim to do so again when we are stable in our island of hope.
Debt restructuring: Others have been wondering why we are not able to restructure our debt. We have tried hard to secure longer-term, lower-interest loans, but have found it impossible so far. That doesn’t mean we shan’t try again between February and April. But in the world we find ourselves in, we much prefer equity over new debt.
2. Asset sales
Approach: Working with Strutt & Parker, we are dividing our assets into smaller lots than we did in 2024 to attract a broader range of buyers (more on this at the end).
Priorities: We will be favouring local buyers and partners aligned with our mission where we are able to, with loan deadlines necessitating flexibility. We must repay one creditor by the end of March and our other by May.
3. Balancing fundraising and asset sales
Opportunities: Ahead of the fundraising round and the asset sales campaign we already have exciting opportunities on each track. In fundraising, we are hopeful – with good reason – of investment in the period of the campaigns from at least one of the pioneering nature funds that are beginning to emerge. We have strong interest in some assets already, including from potential buyers also interested in partnering with us on land management via our Operating System Partnership for Rewilding model (OSPREY).
Flexibility: If we make early headway with our fundraising, we will be in a position to tune down asset sales. And if we are able to raise enough via a combination of fundraising and asset sales to pay all remaining debt by the end of May, and have enough working capital to keep our operations going, we would be able to give potential buyers in our local communities more time to buy assets from us. We favour such sales, and have already completed two, in Tayvallich, to the joy of all concerned. Such community sales, however, tend to take more time than most purchases of assets.
4. Our future as a data-led service provider
Progress: We will go into the pitching of our business plan with two examplars of this model underway. We are leasing land and managing it for nature on both Tayvallich and Bunloit. We are hopeful of being able to do the same at Beldorney. We will be able to demonstrate to potential investors how such partnerships can work in practice, positioning both our company and the landowner partner well for economic rewards from trustably measurable carbon- and biodiversity uplifts, and other nature-based services such as water retention on the land (to mitigate risk of flooding).
Vision: This is the basis of our argument that we can scale, and make good returns for investors, whilst helping growing numbers of landowners to begin reversing biodiversity collapse and in the process create islands of hope of their own.
How You Can Help
If you see any possibilities to work with us on any of the above, or for people or organisations in your networks so to do, please get in touch. Please also get in touch if you would like to see the land and property brochures when they become available.
Please wish us luck, and for those of you of faith, please include us in your appeals and thanks. We are taking big risks on a very tough frontier, as you all know, in the hope of helping to face down existential threats to cohesive society.
The Highlands Rewilding Board