We will be looking at this trend and the related Spatial Finance and Natural Asset Companies as Spring approaches.
From Reuters, January 27:
Climate-savvy millionaires are buying up huge areas of the Scottish Highlands and transforming how it is managed. These "green lairds," many of them from overseas, are rekindling debates about who owns Scotland’s land and what they’re doing with it.
The main road into Kildrummy, a 5,500-acre estate on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, runs past a ruined castle and across a scaffold-clad bridge to an unloved building that the new American owners, Camille and Christopher Bently, call the manor. It was built in 1901 to accommodate shooting parties held by Colonel James “Soapy” Ogston, who made his fortune from a soap factory in nearby Aberdeen.
The Bentlys are restoring the manor as their home. Beyond an entrance hall bristling with deer antlers is a gloomy interior with a grand stairway and extravagantly flowered wallpaper, time-dimmed and peeling. Camille Bently brings out the estate’s old game books, handwritten records of the thousands of grouse, deer, pheasant and duck that were once shot at Kildrummy each year. The game books also note the hunters’ names and the conditions for each day’s shoot. Camille reads one entry – “Birds did not want to fly today” – and snorts: “No shit.”
Camille and Christopher, a multimillionaire property developer from California, bought Kildrummy in 2020 for £11 million, or about $15 million. The estate has dense timber forests, wind-raked moors, a botanical garden and that atmospheric castle. It also has a history that the Bentlys, both avid conservationists, are determined to forget.
Wealthy people have long come to Kildrummy to shoot grouse and other game, an elite pastime that involves intense management of the land. Heather-clad moors are partially burned to improve breeding conditions for the grouse, whose predators are trapped, poisoned and killed. In 2015, a Kildrummy gamekeeper was jailed for four months after he was secretly filmed battering a rare hawk to death.
The Bentlys have banned trapping and sport shooting at Kildrummy and aim to turn the estate into a semi-wilderness where dwindling species are revived and protected. “There’s been too long a history of abuse on this land,” Christopher says. “It’s just got to stop.”
The Bentlys join the growing ranks of so-called “green lairds” – climate-savvy millionaires and billionaires who are transforming how the Scottish Highlands are managed and valued. Traditional hunting estates such as Kildrummy that once changed hands largely on the value of their “bag counts” – the amount of game bagged each year – are increasingly coveted for their “natural capital”: the value of assets such as forests that absorb carbon or habitats that sustain biodiversity.
Galbraith, a leading Scottish property agent, said the value of some hill ground in Scotland has doubled in recent years, driven by a surge in interest from private and corporate investors looking to meet their climate commitments by planting forests or reviving biodiversity.
The political climate is also changing for the old estates. The Scottish government said last year that grouse shooting and muirburn – the practice of burning heather to encourage new shoots that provide nutrition for the grouse and insects for their chicks – will soon only be permitted under licenses, and that burning on carbon-rich peatland will be banned outright. Muirburn has transformed the Highlands; viewed from above, they are tiger-striped with burnt areas.
Amid a fervor for Scottish independence, the rise of the green lairds has revived debates about who owns Scotland’s land and what they’re doing with it. Campaigners say fewer than 500 people own more than half of Scotland’s private land, and many of them are foreigners.
The UK’s largest private landowner is Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, who owns the global clothing chain Bestseller – and 221,000 acres of Scotland. An additional 100,000 acres belong to Swedish-born sisters Sigrid and Lisbet Rausing, heirs to the Tetra Pak fortune. Povlsen and the Rausings also have ambitious plans to restore habitats and boost wildlife. Sigrid Rausing notes that she and her sister are British citizens. Tim Kirkwood, CEO of Wildland Limited, Povlsen's conservation and hospitality company, says it would be harder for nature to respond to its efforts without the company owning multiple and often adjoining estates....
....MUCH MORE
Maybe this stuff as well, though you'll have to bribe lobby some politicians to get subsidies:
