Nature recovery, at its core, recognises the intimate interconnections between humans and the living planet. It aims to establish processes to create healthy and resilient ecosystems that benefit both people and nature. However, with growing urgency to address the climate and biodiversity crisis, there are concerns that an increasing focus on emergency politics can end up compromising sustainability transformation by sidelining wider justice, democracy, and well-being goals. Complexity and uncertainty can be considered obstacles to urgent change that need to be mitigated against, and democratic participation something that needs to be “put on hold” in times of crisis.
This project explores how risk and uncertainty impacts the ability of nature recovery efforts to meet multiple goals for people, nature, and climate. It examines the tension between the desire for certainty and urgent action in nature recovery, and embracing the complex and uncertain reality of transformations towards sustainability. This issue is particularly relevant among calls for increasing private investment through market-based mechanisms, which can prioritise more precisely measurable, predictable, and verifiable processes and outcomes for financing nature recovery.
The transdisciplinary project conducts theoretically-informed research which is solutions-focused and can deliver real-world impact. It will work closely with project partners and interest groups to co-design key aspects, ensuring relevant and actionable outcomes for policy and practice. Building on previous work, the research will focus on case study landscapes in the Scottish Highlands and consider these issues within wider UK, European, and international contexts. Project partners include the Loch Abar Mòr (LAM) restoration partnership. Lochaber is a vast region of the west Highlands, covering 4,600 square kilometres, from the shores of the deepest sea lochs to the summit of the UK’s highest mountain. Led by SCOTLAND: The Big Picture, Loch Abar Mòr is a partnership of landholders, stewarding more than 95,000 acres across Lochaber, who have made a 50-year commitment to restore nature, as a solution to climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.
The main activities focus on engaging with practitioners, policy-makers, and financiers involved in the governance of nature recovery at multiple levels:
- Practitioners: Working closely with nature projects and partnerships in the Scottish Highlands to understand how risk and uncertainty is identified, understood and managed within the context of broader goals and priorities.
- Financiers: Examining the risks related to achieving multiple objectives through high integrity nature and carbon markets, how risks are shaped by private finance mechanisms, and how they are mitigated.
- Policy-makers: Investigating how risk and uncertainty is framed in current policy debates focused on scaling up private investment in nature recovery and what this means for achieving multiple goals for transformative change.
Ambitions for nature recovery in the UK involve profound changes to land use that will shift the ecological composition and appearance of different landscapes. Recovery commonly involves a transition from worked, agricultural landscapes towards those in which natural processes are given more autonomy. It aims to move from landscapes characterised by low biological abundance and diversity, linear landscape features, and tightly controlled processes towards those marked by biological abundance and diversity, complex landscape features, and unpredictable landscape dynamics.
Some British citizens care deeply about the appearance of the landscape and resist radical changes to land use and landscape composition. Although the rural landscape has undergone radical transformation in the last few centuries, there are powerful, conservative cultural ideals of the countryside as a timeless source of aesthetic, moral and political value that is threatened by change. Imagined archetypes with ecological and cultural baselines in a desired past persist into the present. These archetypes have been central to the history of the conservation of cultural landscapes in the UK.
The lowland English countryside and the Scottish Highlands offer two important examples of these archetypes. The first is exemplary of the English Pastoral and second of the Romantic Scottish Sublime. We anticipate that these two aesthetic ideals help frame the landscape preferences of key players in our two case study regions – rural Oxfordshire and the Scottish Cairngorms. They create the popular and powerful archetypes that are both shared and contested by many farmers, foresters, traditional conservationists, tourists, stalkers, and other rural publics. We expect that there is a good chance that they may both configure and restrict the ambitions of those planning and implementing nature recovery projects across the UK. They shape perceptions of responsible land management and of mess and messiness.
This project aims to test this hypothesis to answer the following research questions:
What are the common aesthetics of UK nature recovery?
How do they contrast with the pastoral and sublime, as expressed in Oxfordshire and the Cairngorms?
How might different publics and stakeholders be engaged in deliberating the aesthetics of nature recovery?
Is there are middle ground between the aesthetics of recovery and the aesthetics of pastoral and the sublime – for example in the aesthetics of regenerative agriculture?
Why study aesthetics?
Aesthetics involves the study of perception and the generally pleasant experience of a sight, sound and smell or taste. There is much debate about the degree to which aesthetics are socially constructed or innate. But research shows that aesthetics underpins both environmental ethics and politics. Aesthetics shape the emotional attachments people form with species and landscapes. It propels relations of curiosity, care, and protection, as well as dislike and disgust. Landscape aesthetics also reflects the predominant social order. They express powerful ways of seeing that may serve to naturalise the status quo. These ways of seeing are contextual and contingent and are thus contested. As a consequence, past and current debates about what is natural and right for the UK countryside are strongly shaped by aesthetic, as well as ecological and economic considerations.
Forest expansion is an increasing UK priority and Scotland, which was historically extensively forested, receives a significant proportion of this. Mature forest remnants in the Scottish Highlands support rare specialist species and many have been continuously forested for millennia. However, current policies and grants incentivise forest creation by planting, leading to under investment in protection of and expansion from forest remnants. Using a combination of designed experiments and data collection across natural gradients, this project will explore aboveground processes of forest establishment and interactions with belowground communities and soil properties, providing evidence on outcomes of forest expansion by natural regeneration vs planting.
In collaboration with Trees for Life, we are collecting data on soil communities and properties across a landscape-scale network of plots within Trees for Life’s Caledonian Recovery Project and Wild Trees Survey. Trees for Life’s pioneering work provides detailed information on the status of mature forest remnants across Scotland and the dynamics of natural tree regeneration within and around these remnants. We will link data on tree regeneration and forest status to a set of variables on soil communities, soil physical properties, and soil chemical properties. Soil communities both facilitate tree establishment and respond to the establishment of trees, driving subsequent changes in soil physical and chemical properties.
Data collection across the natural gradient of forest status represented by Trees for Life’s network of survey plots will be complemented by experimental work in collaboration with Highlands Rewilding. We have co-designed experiments with Highlands Rewilding, exploring mechanisms of forest establishment and soil property/community responses. Experiments consider natural regeneration and tree planting as mechanisms of native forest creation in a clear-fell plantation (Bunloit Estate) and grassland context (Beldorney Estate). In the Bunloit experiment we have an additional treatment assessing the efficacy of mycorrhizal inoculation of tree establishment.
This project aims to promote Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and nature recovery initiatives that are more effective, equitable, and financially sustainable by leveraging participatory governance processes. It is part of two broader projects, the NERC-funded Agile Initiative project on ‘Scaling up NbS in the UK’ and the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, and is being conducted in collaboration with the Nature-based Solutions Initiative. The solutions-focused and interdisciplinary project aims to deliver relevant, timely, and actionable evidence and recommendations for practitioners and policy-makers in the UK.
NbS has gained international attention for their potential to deliver multiple sustainability goals by addressing climate change, biodiversity decline, inequality and human well-being issues. However, it is crucial that NbS are designed and implemented in a holistic, integrated, and inclusive way to deliver multiple benefits while addressing trade-offs between goals. At its core, this approach involves ensuring that NbS treats humans and nature as interconnected, while tackling unequal power dynamics and promoting socially ‘just’ outcomes. This project ultimately aims to promote more integrated approaches to facilitate interconnected thinking among decision-makers, and more joined-up policy support and implementation at local, regional, and national scales.
The main project activities and outcomes include:
- Co-designing the project with partners from across the public, private and third sectors in the UK. Partners included Highlands Rewilding, Nattergal, Defra, Natural England, Environment Agency, BBOWT, National Trust, NFU, RBG Kew, UK CEH, WWF, University of Aberdeen and others. This helped to shape the research and deliver outputs that are relevant, useful, and actionable in policy and practice.
- Working as part of an interdisciplinary team to produce the Nature-based Solutions Knowledge Hub, which is an integrated one-stop resource to guide users through the process of governing, designing, and funding NbS and monitoring the outcomes. Specifically, this project delivered the Recipe for Engagement (RfE), a new flexible guide for the participatory governance that can be applied and adapted to a wide range of nature recovery and NbS projects.
- Working closely with Highlands Rewilding to design and implement a ‘Community Engagement Roadmap’, which sets out some key principles and practical steps for engaging and delivering community benefits from rewilding projects. This project team also collaborated with Joshua Davis (lead author) at the Countryside and Community Research Institute to produce an evidence report and guide for Nattergal on ‘Best Practice Engagement in Landscape-scale Nature Recovery Projects’.
- Engaged with policy-makers and produced a policy brief on ‘Embedding nature recovery in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill’ which was submitted as evidence to the House of Lords.
- In addition to the impact-focused outputs, this project is publishing a series of academic papers on the politics, power, and participation dynamics of NbS and nature recovery.
