Founder’s Note: Introducing NatureProsperity

Whenever I hear talk of my entrepreneurial creations being successful, I invariably suffer from an attack of imposter syndrome. The reason is that I know, in truth, that the successes at Solarcentury and SolarAid were driven by brilliant operational teams. Solarcentury could not have helped the global solar market take off exponentially without them. SolarAid could not have triggered the first two exponential solar lighting markets in Africa without them.

It will be no different at NatureProsperity, my latest entrepreneurial creation, which goes live today. Succeed or fail, I will be totally reliant on brilliant teams.

One thing will be different though. Success at Solarcentury and SolarAid entailed social benefit in a single industry sector, energy. Solarcentury installations displaced coal, oil and gas use. SolarAid lighting displaced kerosene. The most immediate social benefit, in both cases, was abatement of climate change in the energy sector.

If NatureProsperity succeeds, it will have moved the dial across multiple sectors in an entire economy. Indeed, it may well have helped lead the way to an entire new economy, one much more suited to the resilience needed in the face of the current world disorder. And where Scotland might lead, other nations might follow.

That is a huge prize. One big enough even to have a chance of helping save democracy, given the extent to which nature-based resilience protects social cohesion. I will be praying for teams brilliant enough to deliver it, and – in parallel with that - investors bold enough to believe it can deliver ethical profitability.

Let me explain.

Much of Scotland’s economy is rural, and lurking in that economy - waiting to be awakened - is something I think of as the nature prosperity pump. This is no ordinary pump. It has the ability to dismantle three existential threats to the Scottish economy: climate meltdown, biodiversity collapse, and the national housing emergency, a.k.a the national dearth of affordable housing.

The nature prosperity pump begins with Scottish vegetation sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That part of the vegetation that can be used for sustainable forestry provides timber. The timber is used to manufacture affordable wooden housing. The wooden housing is deployed at scale.

We begin to defuse the three existential crises first because the sucking down into ecosystems of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, helps abate climate meltdown. The timber housing locks carbon dioxide away further: around a tonne for every cubic metre of wood in a wooden building. It saves still further carbon, and household bills, because little or no fossil fuel needs to be burned to heat and electrify the house.

Second, the timber housing can be made affordably, helping to dismantle the national housing emergency.

Third, crucially - and this is how the pump closes - deploying the timber housing at scale provides homes for the workforce needed if nature recovery is to be undertaken at the landscape scale needed to hit national targets on biodiversity and climate. This must include the full panoply of nature recovery: in woods and forestland, peatland, pastures, soils, rivers and all the offshore environments where so much carbon can be stored: in kelp, seagrass, and salt marsh in particular.

This is what I and the first members of my NatureProsperity teams aspire to.

I am personally so keen to see that happen that I will work full time in NatureProsperity as its first CEO, leaving my Highlands Rewilding COO Keir Smith to take over as Acting CEO. (When we are sufficiently capitalised he will then become CEO of NatureProsperity Forests and Timber).

I will leave the website to explain further what we have in mind for the NatureProsperity project, as we evolve it.

If you want to be involved in delivering the mission / making the mission happen, as part of the team or supporting the project, get in contact.

Founder’s Note: Introducing NatureProsperity

A Tale of Two Economies