Delivering community benefits from nature restoration work

Alys Daniels-Creasey is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, working in collaboration with the Scottish Land Commission. With a background in social sciences, Alys is interested in the local community implications of natural capital markets and environmental/land use decision-making in Scotland.

Introduction

In Scotland, how we use land is central to the conversation around the twinned climate and biodiversity crises; we know that we need to shift land use towards practices that actively support and restore nature. Most obviously, these practices strive to achieve a multitude of environmental benefits that secure our ecological future. Yet, what also matters in this conversation is how we consider the various other benefits that nature restoration work either already generates or has the potential to realise, such as the production of social, cultural, or economic value for local communities.

Although the delivery of community benefits from nature restoration work is a relatively recent topic of discussion in Scotland, ideas surrounding community relationships to land are not new. The Scottish landscape is home to a long history of community involvement, engagement, and relations with land, translating into contemporary aspirations for a Just Transition. This aims to not only carry out climate change action in a fair way that leaves no one behind, but to actively tackle inequalities and improve collective wellbeing through these actions. As such, delivering community benefits may come to be seen as a central pillar, and requirement, of changing land use practices to fulfil environmental goals.

Interviewing nature restoration professionals

But what does this look like in practice? What are the opportunities and challenges apparent when considering how to deliver community benefits? These are the sorts of questions the Scottish Land Commission (SLC) and I were interested in considering. I interviewed six people who work on various aspects of nature restoration in the Cairngorms National Park under a range of landownership and governance types and on different scales. We hoped to understand their perspectives on the current and possible future delivery of community benefits through their efforts and see what work might need doing in terms of supporting people in similar roles to deliver community benefits going forward.

Socio-cultural benefits realised; economic benefits a challenge?

The findings suggest that nature restoration professionals are often passionate about how their work can benefit local communities and can offer various examples of how this is already being done. In particular, socio-cultural benefits such as nature access, skills development opportunities, and strengthening ties between people and place were seen to be opportune community benefits to deliver. Further, these socio-cultural benefits were understood to indirectly benefit the wider local economy through increased local employment opportunities, attracting new residents, and boosting ecotourism.

Alongside these positive reports of current practices, though, there exists some apprehension around the desirability and feasibility of delivering certain benefits; particularly, direct economic benefits such as establishing and/or contributing towards community benefit funds. This is where discussions highlighted some of the challenges involved in delivering benefits, touching on the financial uncertainties involved in making these work (often in relation to hesitancy around natural capital markets) and an assumed lack of resulting community benefit (comparative to the perceived potential for positive impact related to delivering other benefits).

Key takeaways: the best way forward?

Perhaps a key takeaway of this small-scale interview project is that it is important to keep having these conversations: the ‘best’ way forward, in terms of what types of community benefits we should be striving to deliver and how nature restoration professionals can best be supported in doing these, is not a settled matter. Whilst values of fairness, holistic thinking, and collaboration already permeate these discussions, there are many more conversations to be had surrounding incidental versus additional benefit delivery, logistics and support in the practice of delivery, and hesitancy around natural capital market risks, the latter of which is likely to need addressing if restoration work is to deliver direct financial benefits.

One thing that does remain clear from this work, though, is that those working hard to restore nature hold a lot of care, not just for securing ecological futures but also socio-cultural ones too. Further, there is appetite to develop the delivery of community benefits beyond current practices; building upon the many positive foundations already in place, and through continued conversations surrounding the opportunities and challenges ahead with all relevant stakeholders, my hope is that we can keep developing our collective vision for what delivering ecological and community benefit from restoration work can look like across Scotland.