One Investor’s Uphill Battle to Turn Rewilding Into a Multi-Billion Dollar Industry

On a remote peninsula of Scotland, there’s an experiment underway to put a dollar value on nature restoration — the first step to turning stunning landscapes around the world into assets that some investors hope will soon be worth fortunes.

Highlands Rewilding earlier this year bought a 1370-hectare estate called Tayvallich on a tongue of land on the country’s west coast for £10.5 million ($13 million). The company plans to restore native fens, juniper heath and fragments of temperate Atlantic rainforest that have been lost due to decades of overgrazing by sheep and deer. Funds for the project were gathered together from varied sources — there’s Boston-based MFS Investment Management and wealthy individuals, but also small-time investors from a crowdfunding campaign and a £12 million loan from the UK Infrastructure Bank.