Over 75,000ac of land in Scotland is now under even more sustainable management, thanks to a pilot leadership programme designed to bring about positive environmental change at the biggest possible scale.
Following their participation in Soil Association Scotland’s Landscape Leadership programme, a group of private landowners and managers, NGO and community trust land managers are planting more native trees, opening up discussions between different types of landowners, and restoring peatland across Scotland.
Collectively, the group manage over 75,000ac of land, and despite a diverse set of aims and priorities, all were united in their desire to restore nature and mitigate climate change for Scotland’s future generations.
The group worked together in a mix of residential and then online sessions from January to October, with leadership coaching and input from land managers running large-scale environmental projects, such as assessing natural capital on the Buccleuch Estate and exploring potential carbon markets.
Change of focus
Participant Antony Gifford, owner of Kinnordy and Balintore Estates in Angus, has changed the focus of his large-scale woodland creation project thanks to the programme.
“We’re planting about 300ha of new woodland on our hill farm.
So that will be 550,000 trees going into the ground next summer. About 40% of the trees on our current scheme are commercial, predominantly Sitka spruce, but the conversations we’ve had on the programme have made me question whether we’ve got the right mix of trees.
“We’ve got another two projects of a similar size we could look at in the future, and we’ll probably plant less spruce and more native trees, because I’m more comfortable that carbon markets will mature to a point where you can actually make educated estimates of how to build them into a long-term model,” he concluded.
