UK nature investors face a bigger risk than Trump

Green investors have long faced opposition from climate change deniers - and sometimes also from nimbies. Trump turbocharges these. But UK green investment faces a bigger challenge: short-sightedness. 

While media focus has centred on the farming inheritance tax controversy, a wider controversy is brewing: nature funding.  The government has committed to “action to drive nature’s recovery” via an ambitious Land Use Framework to protect 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030 (30by30), to support the COP15 target. Post-Brexit, UK farming support shifted from direct payments to farmers for farming to payments that pay for the delivery of nature as a public good. With NHS investment regarded as a more pressing government priority, these will reduce. So to help substitute, the government has launched a consultation on how  private sector investment in nature recovery can pick up the slack, building on biodiversity and carbon credits. 

Most voters are pro-nature: who wouldn’t be? But the media is reporting growing criticism from MPs on behalf of constituents of investment projects, and also of government policies and regulations, which self-identify as pro-nature but have outcomes which communities regard as anti-nature. These include the spring 2025 cull by a pro-nature investor of Scottish wild goats. The previous year, ill-thought-out pro-nature regulations devised under the outgoing Conservative government threatened to require a cull of most of Dartmoor’s historic semi-wild native ponies, prompting national media focus on a petition that grew to more than 100,000 signatures. Ironically Dartmoor’s ponies are the logo of Dartmoor National Park. This led the new Labour government, in response to MP and public pressure to require the policy they inherited to be changed to avert the cull. 

Meanwhile in the Lake District, nature campaigners have launched a report calling for the Lake District to lose UNESCO world heritage status. Local farmers such as James Rebanks have championed nature. But the Guardian quotes the RSPB’s David Morris, backing the report and claiming that the designation, “has been misused to protect probably some of the most ecologically damaging and economically loss-making agriculture practices in the English uplands,” and enabled “nimbyism” against conservation efforts, an approach branded misguided and poorly judged by local MP and Shadow DEFRA spokesperson Tim Farron.

Reform is hunting for votes and believes an anti-green message will help get them. They are banking on net zero investors and the rough edges of pro-nature policies driving a wedge between rural voters on the one hand and pro-green MPs on the other. The rhetoric of some nature campaigners, implying that nature and rural farming communities are antithetical, is counterproductive to their professed cause. But branding farmers as antithetical to nature is becoming more widespread. Pro-nature campaigners Wild Justice, whose directors include famed former TV presenter Chris Packham, have launched legal action against the Dartmoor Commoners Council (the collective of Dartmoor’s farming community), blogging “time to wield a stick, we say”. Their cheerleaders, including noted celebrity Ben Goldsmith, claimed on X that Dartmoor is a "bare, lifeless desert" and that, “People who say this place is ‘natural’ and ‘wild’ are simply brainwashed”. Yet Dartmoor has been a grazed pastoral landscape since the Bronze Age, which is why, like Stonehenge, Dartmoor is an area with an unusually significant concentration of historic neolithic monuments. 

Net-zero and climate campaigners have placed great emphasis on the importance of the science, of evidence-based policy. But claims to moral superiority based upon scientific proofs will ring increasingly hollow with MPs as well as voters if a cavalier attitude to science and to fact is allowed to take root in government and businesses who wish for public acceptability of green policy and green investments. As the NFU President recently urged, nature intervention plans need to be “ground truthed” in order to sustain credibility in the communities where the interventions are planned. The lack of enthusiasm in Whitehall to address the failings in their showpiece new AI-created peatland map as highlighted in The Times does not suggest this is yet understood. 

Prince William has now announced a plan to boost nature on Dartmoor, much of which is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, including support for peatland conservation. His personal focus on this might help encourage the care for evidence and for community engagement that is needed.

Green energy developers have long recognised the importance of investing in community engagement in building community support. Nature investors need to consider how they take local communities with them as well, and encourage regulators and Whitehall to value work at a local level, incorporating the insights that local people including farmers have, into the nature in which they live their daily lives, otherwise growing voter scepticism will create political pressure that will make UK nature investments as risky as in Trump’s America.