Pedro Prata presses a shushing finger to his lips and reaches for his binoculars. “There, see it?” he says, pointing across the lake. “Below to the right, on that small island, a great heron’s nest.” Its greyish-blue owner is barely visible against the leafy backdrop; she looks to be bending over to feed her chicks.
It is a perfectly still afternoon in a remote part of north-eastern Portugal. No traffic, no people. Only the chirping and chattering of songbirds breaks the silence: warblers, blackcaps, shrikes, plus a particularly perky cuckoo.
Prata is the founder of Rewilding Portugal, a non-profit that promotes nature conservation. For all his enthusiasm, he reserves his real excitement for the region’s “keystone” species, notably the Iberian lynx and the Iberian wolf — both of which have seen their habitats (and thus their numbers) shrink rapidly over recent decades.
“Our goal is to acquire land that is not currently protected and then use it as islands of sanctuary,” says Prata, an evolutionary biologist-turned-conservationist. “That way, these iconic species will have somewhere to take refuge and a base from which they can spread.”
It is a vision that a small but growing number of wealthy donors share. From the bushveld of Botswana to the forests of São Tomé and Príncipe, billionaire philanthropists are buying land explicitly to return it to nature.
The modern practice dates back to the early 1990s when Douglas Tompkins, co-founder of fashion brands Esprit and The North Face, started buying large sections of wilderness in southern Chile. By the time of his death after a kayaking accident in 2015, he had amassed more than 2mn acres — all of it earmarked for rewilding.
Others among the world’s super-rich who have followed his lead include Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, heir to the MFI furniture chain Paul Lister, Danish clothing brand boss Anders Polvsen and Tetra-Pak heiress Lisbet Rausing.
Rewilding Portugal is a direct beneficiary of the trend. The birdwatching haven that Prata cherishes was recently purchased by a British financier. Under the terms of an initial five-year management plan, Prata and his colleagues have agreed to help bring the 300-hectare site back to life.
It needs it. Situated in an otherwise bucolic spot in Portugal’s Côa Valley, close to the Spanish border, the place was home to a working mine until about a decade ago. The remnants of that industrial history are everywhere to see: hillsides half-quarried out, trees stunted by metallic toxins, heavy equipment rusting in the bushes. The site’s one redeeming feature, its lakes, only exist because rainwater happens to have filled in some of the mine’s old pits.
Yet the land’s new owner has big ambitions for its regeneration. An initial management agreement with Rewilding Portugal sets out plans for a large-scale clean-up, followed by some judicious replanting and the construction of new waterways. In an initial attempt to diversify the site’s flora, meanwhile, Prata and his colleagues have introduced a small herd of indigenous Sorraia ponies to serve as large grazers.
The rich backers of the global rewilding movement are not all motivated by the same reasons. Some are passionate about environmental issues, others are interested in creating a lasting legacy, says Karl Wagner, co-director of the Global Rewilding Alliance, a network of about 150 conservation groups.
What binds them, however, is a personal connection with nature, he notes: “At the end of the day, there are only a certain number of paintings you can hang on your wall, right? But contribute to creating the requisite conditions for beavers to return, as is happening now in Portugal, and that gives a completely different feeling.”
Ben Goldsmith, a fund manager and son of the late British financier James Goldsmith, concurs. A keen environmentalist, he credits the beauty of the natural world with offering him a “ray of light” after the death of his 15-year-old daughter in a quad bike accident four years ago.
Goldsmith, who has written about the experience in a new book, God Is An Octopus, has set up an investment fund dedicated to delivering “nature recovery at scale”. The £35mn fund, christened Nattergal (the Danish word for “nightingale”), is currently overseeing two significant rewilding projects in England — in Norfolk and Lincolnshire.
Compared with a macro issue such as climate change or plastic pollution, rewilding offers an “immediacy” of return, he argues. It’s also a positive and joyful pursuit: “A lot of the climate debate is about stopping things happening [but] rewilding, in contrast, is about working towards making an ecosystem better right in front of your own eyes.”
Buying land is not the only option. Indeed, in industrialised economies such as those in western Europe and North America, a combination of premium land prices and diversified ownership complicates rewilding projects that rely on large-scale land acquisitions.
A common alternative is for large landowners to give over some of their existing holdings to the cause of rewilding. In the UK, private estates to have adopted this tack include Doddington in Lincolnshire, Lowther in Cumbria, Wild Ken Hill in Norfolk, Broughton in Yorkshire, and Knepp in West Sussex.
All are cited as progressive case studies by Rewilding Britain, an advocacy organisation that also works closely with the Crown Estate, the British monarchy’s multibillion-pound legacy portfolio of land and property holdings. According to Kate Barclay, the charity’s lead fundraiser, competition for land would make mimicking the Tompkins’ model in much of Britain almost impossible.
“Fortunately, some of the UK’s biggest landowners are interested in turning over a proportion of their estate,” she says. “We don’t tell them what to do with their land, but rather we suggest alternative ways of managing it.”
Those other options differ from site to site. At Knepp, for instance, owners Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree opted to overcome the degradation caused by a century of dairy farming by introducing free-roaming herbivores. Back in Portugal, meanwhile, the family-owned Symington wine group is trying to attract genet cats and other native mammals back to its estates in the Douro valley by regenerating scrubland next to its vineyards.
Where all concur is that rewilding almost always requires some form of active management. For early pioneers such as Doug Tompkins, the opposite often held true. Far better to just remove humans from the picture altogether, the theory ran, and allow nature to heal itself.
Nature’s extraordinary capacity for its own self-recovery is something in which Kris Tompkins, Doug Tompkins’s widow and former chief executive of outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, remains a firm believer.
A hands-off approach presents two practical obstacles, however. First and most obvious is the sheer scale of biodiversity loss. Over the last half century, species populations have registered an average decline of 69 per cent, according to environmental charity, WWF. If a native species has disappeared, nature alone can’t bring it back.
This reality hit Kris Tompkins after she and her husband purchased a 200,000-acre plot in Argentina’s Iberá region in the late 1990s. The pair quickly discovered that all the area’s top predators had “literally gone”. The realisation precipitated a significant species reintroduction effort, which, over the years, has seen the return of everything from giant anteaters and maned wolves to Andean condors and jaguars.
As Tompkins explains: “Landscape without wildlife is just scenery, and we are not in the scenery business . . . If we are after fully functioning ecosystems, then we have no choice but to intervene.”
Intervening is clearly far more labour intensive than buying land and leaving it to its own devices. In the Tompkins’ case, there was not only “a lot of making it up as you go along”, but also years of effort to build a team of experts willing to work long term in such a remote location, she says.
Were she to have her time again and were something like the Tompkins Foundation to have existed, she would most likely have avoided going it alone, she concedes. Some of today’s philanthropists are eager to get their hands dirty. That’s fine, she says. But for everyone else, her recommendation is to get yourself a specialist partner.
“Most of the partnerships that we’ve formed over the years are with big contributors who are exactly like this,” she says. “They really want to work at a very large scale, but they don’t want the headaches of doing so.”
The second hurdle is similarly pragmatic. People proliferate. Like it or not, most corners of the planet — especially those in need of regeneration — are now occupied, even if sporadically.
Gaining the acceptance of local populations is therefore vital to the long-term viability of any attempt at large-scale rewilding.
It is a lesson that Christoph and Barbara Promberger have learnt over the course of a 16-year endeavour to turn a 200,000-hectare section of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains into eastern Europe’s largest national park.
Wealthy funders love the idea. Major backers of the Prombergers’ project over the years include, among others, the charitable foundations of Wyss, Rausing and British billionaire Alan Parker, who is chair of PR group Brunswick and a longtime philanthropist. Some locals, on the other hand, are decidedly more sceptical.
Christoph Promberger is under no illusions about the depths of animosity and suspicion. As he notes: “Many local people here hate the national parks. They usually have no infrastructure and bring local communities no advantage . . . somebody in Bucharest just draws a line on a map and says, ‘This is now a National Park’.”
Economic regeneration has therefore always featured high in the Prombergers’ efforts. The foundation they operate counts a variety of “conservation enterprises” in sectors such as eco-tourism, forest restoration, and sustainable food production — an example of the latter being the breeding of Hungarian Grey cattle for pasture-fed beef.
Establishing a national park looms large in the plans of many rich rewilders, who see it as a mechanism for securing their investments in perpetuity. Land donations by the Tompkins Conservation, for example, have so far helped create nine new national parks in Chile and Argentina and facilitate the expansion of six others.
National parks also hold out the prospect of scale, with private investors using their land as leverage for larger land concessions from other parties. The Carpathia Foundation created by the Prombergers at present only owns 27,000 hectares, so less than one-seventh needed for the national park it envisages. The Romanian state, on the other hand, controls one-third.
“At some point, we will go to the government and ask them to put their 33 per cent under a formal protection, and in turn we will gift our land to the country in order to leverage its full potential,” explains Christoph Promberger.
Money, unsurprisingly, also weighs on the minds of the wealthy individuals who back rewilding.
Conservation is a costly business. Under a landmark UN agreement that was signed last December, at least 30 per cent of the earth’s land and water needs protected status by 2030.
Philanthropy alone will not get close to that figure, however deep donors’ pockets.
Estimates by the World Bank suggest that up to $700bn will be needed to hit biodiversity conservation targets. That is per year. Only by tapping capital markets is there any hope of reaching such a sum, argues Knepp co‑owner, Burrell.
“Conservationists are always scrabbling around for money, but the figures we’re talking about now are enormous, right? Yet, we’ve got to do this, so let’s start with the idea that we must and then go from there,” he says.
Sharing that view is Swiss billionaire, André Hoffmann, who is bankrolling efforts to establish initial protocols for the issuance of biodiversity credits. The approach works much like conventional carbon credit schemes, only with a more complex list of metrics than simply carbon emissions: think, soil health, water quality, air quality, pollination potential and a host of other ecosystem-specific measures.
The idea is not without its detractors, who see it as a backdoor to the commoditisation of nature. “Supping with the devil” is the phrase used by Hoffmann, who marries his time rewilding with the vice-chair of his family’s drug company, Roche. His response? Biodiversity credits not only radically expand the potential pot for rewilding, but also distance the field from the whims of individual philanthropists.
Both reasons explain the recent decision by the Hoffmann family to close the MAVA Foundation, a charitable trust set up by André’s father in 1994. Over its lifetime, the grant-making body poured SFr1.4bn ($1.27bn) into hundreds of rewilding and biodiversity projects around the world. In its place, Hoffmann has set up RePLANET, a company specialising in carbon and biodiversity credits.
“I’m not saying that we should throw philanthropy away [but] you’re not likely to be as efficient at giving out money as you have been in making [it], so there is a need for professionalisation.”
Back in Portugal’s Côa Valley, Prata is in cautious agreement. If, and when, the market for biodiversity credits gets off the ground, he will happily sign up. Now, though, he’s got his eye on a 550-hectare cattle ranch. Asking price? “€650,000, give or take,” he says. The farmer is retiring and likes the idea of his land returning to nature.
“The cows have had it long enough, he reckons,” Prata says. “Time to give the wildlife a go.”
This article is part of FT Wealth, a section providing in-depth coverage of philanthropy, entrepreneurs, family offices, as well as alternative and impact investment
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