Author Archives: Julian Matthews, Managing Director, Real Wild Estates

In this week’s episode of Financing Nature, GFI Hive talks to long-time conservationist Julian Matthews of The Real Wild Estates Company about the business case for restoring nature. Julian’s business was recently invested in by the L’Oreal Fund for Nature Regeneration. Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/dm8aWzxC

Real Wild Estates has already worked out the metrics to make nature restoration a viable land use option, so this Savills ‘Business of Rewilding’ spotlight report published this January just confirms what we are already telling real asset investors and present landowners. What it doesn’t highlight is that some other options and opportunities today can make restoring ecosystems even more viable and even more resilient.

The research below highlights that it is now more profitable to convert to a rewilding land use system, than two other forms of land use; arable contract farming and tenancy farming.

COMPARATIVE ECONOMICS OF RURAL BUSINESS MODELS

Savills Research Jan 2022

	Farm Business Tenancy	Arable contract farming agreement	REWILDING conversion
Income (£/ha/yr)	Arable rental income	Winter wheat, oil seed rape, spring barley (three crop rotation) Sustainable Farming incentive (arable soil standard intermediate level)	WD6 – creation of wood pasture SP9 – native breeds at risk supplement OR1 – Organic conversion Grazing licence fee
	£263	£1491	£575
Costs (£/ha/yr)	None	Seeds Fertiliser Spray Contractors costs and profit share	Grass seed, tree planting costs (100% grant funded) Livestock handling (90% grant funded) Fencing, water supply for livestock (60% grant funded)
	£0	£1128	£13
Net margin (£/ha/yr)	£263	£363	£562

*all models exclude Basic Payment scheme income. Rewilding model assumes a 200ha project and capital costs are depreciated over 10 years.

 

Firstly, these figures are wholly government funded Stewardship conversions (from just 3 of the 130 stewardship options available!), and one of the things that any landowner will tell you, is that being too dependent on government subsidies is not a good business plan. The key to the future is diverse income streams that decrease the various risks that land managers have always faced.

Secondly these figures do not include any of the new payment options that are coming down the line, collectively known as natural capital, including carbon sequestration from the huge market for offsets and net zero commitments by corporates and the financial community; water catchment payments from water utilities, biodiversity net gain possibilities, or those payments still in their infancy but we believe will figure prominently in the future including soil carbon (i.e. soil health) and biodiversity credits. Our own WildnCat yield modelling tool can help landowners and investors calculate these into the future.

Being realistic, not all natural capital options will be applicable or viable to all landowners  and the problem of economies of scale will always beset the application of natural capital payments to many, particularly smallholders, but it does highlight the extraordinary turnaround in both our collective public attitude to this form of future land use, but also the government’s desire, post Brexit and the EU’s Common Agricultural policy, to restore the UK biodiversity from its present position at the very bottom of the rankings of the least biodiverse countries on our fragile planet.

I knew the tigress Collarwali or ‘Mataram’, ‘Respected Mother’ in Hindi, who died 2 days ago. She is a legend in the Pench Tiger Reserve, a wildland that straddles the Madhya Pradesh and Maharashta borders of India. This is not just because she was a great matriarch who lived in the core of the park, where nature tourism was allowed, and where she was comfortable around the many excited visitors and their vehicles in her guarded territory. This was not just because she was happy to show her extraordinary 8 litters, 29 boisterous cubs, to all who found her, including her ‘famous five’ cubs she nurtured to adulthood. This was not simply because so many of her cubs survived to adulthood that she repopulated a denuded landscape with her offspring. This was not only because a BBC film was made of her, countless articles written and scientists studied her every move. It was more than that.

It was because over the last 16 years of her life, she has created a viable, expanding and intact wilderness in which she and her family could survive and prosper. She literally saved her wilderness.

How did she do this, almost single handedly?  Simple. Nature based economics.

Pench was a forgotten park in 2000 – it had been an artillery practice range in the Second World War and had been stripped bare of commercial wood decades before. Then poaching and extraction were rife, guards poorly paid and respected scientists were surprised that such a large herbivore population failed to sustain tigers. Then one naturalist and brave entrepreneur who loved the park, set up a small lodge in early 2004. Most people thought he was mad. Why here, when better parks were nearby that you could see tigers in?  ‘Visitors and tigers will come’ he said. He was right.

The small Turia village besides the park entrance slowly began to see the benefits and the jobs created. The visitors began to come, the park attracted more interest from media and politicians. There was money to be made after all. Soon many visitors, more jobs, more lodges, and other bordering villages began to see the benefits of this new nature based economy. The park director’s job became more important and his staff now saw the benefits of increasingly park fee revenues. The local park guides from the bordering villages now stopped being the victims of conservation and became some of the beneficiaries, encouraging support for the park and its precious wildlife once again. Bollywood celebrities, politicians and even prime ministers started visiting to see what the fuss was about. Pench had gone from unknown, unloved and uncared for, to known, cherished and better funded – in a single decade.

For my small part, I found a 10,000 acre neglected patch of forest adjoining Pench in 2009 called Rukkad and Kurai, and asked to set up a community based conservancy here, to expand the park size by a third. Here was a perfect opportunity to expand the present park and protect critical and contiguous forest landscape to an adjoining park; the better known Kanha Tiger reserve. My proposal was agreed by the Madhya Pradesh government at the time, but rejected by the federal government sadly in April 2010. Today I am delighted this forest is now part and parcel of Pench Tiger Reserve and many of Collarwali’s offspring have benefited from this restored and protected patch of forest in the last decade.

In 2010, my charity TOFTigers had calculated and published that a single tigress in Rajasthan was worth $110million over her lifetime to the local economy. Collarwali was probably worth the same to Madhya Pradesh.

Thank you and rest in peace Collarwali.