Seven and a half thousand acres is a lot of England to hand over to one purpose. The nature-restoration company RESTORE has bought the Emblehope and Burngrange Estate in Northumberland - about 3,035 hectares - backed by close to 9 million pounds in blended finance, including senior debt from Triodos Bank UK [1].
The headline intervention is water. The plan includes rewetting around 800 hectares of degraded peatland, on a 30-year horizon [1]. Drained peat oxidises and releases carbon; rewetted peat stores it, and holds water back from valleys downstream, which is why peatland restoration does two jobs at once.
'What has long been missing from the English uplands is a large-scale site dedicated primarily to the most ambitious forms of nature restoration,' said Benedict Macdonald, RESTORE's founder and director [1].
The financing is the other half of it. 'Financing Emblehope marks an important step in unlocking investment at scale for nature recovery,' said Simon Crichton of Triodos Bank UK [1] - a bank lending against restoration rather than against yield, at a scale that makes 30-year plans possible.
