An ambitious project with a 200-year vision to manage 600 square kilometers of the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland for biodiversity whilst providing other benefits such as carbon storage and livelihoods for local people, it is the largest habitat restoration project in the UK.

Nature-based Intervention:

This project is a partnership of neighboring land managers, with guidance from the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, and has an an unparalleled time frame including goals for 2065 and 2216. As the biggest habitat restoration project in Britain, it spans 600 square kilometers of wild land, 9,800 ha of native woodland, 10,000 ha of rich peat bog, and 23,000 ha of montane habitat, with 5000 recorded species. Management involves a diverse suite of actions across the landscape including restoration of watercourses and floodplains by removing drainage modifications and promoting natural processes, enhancing and expanding native woodlands by managing grazers, removing non-native species, and enrichment planting. Pine plantations are also being managed to become better habitats for wildlife by thinning and species diversification. A major source of carbon drawdown will come from restoration of bog woodlands by creating bog pools, and restoring blanket peat bogs by re-profiling peat bog channels and using boulders to slow water flow.

Overview of context and outcomes:

The Cairngorms are a mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland. They hold some of the last historic woodland fragments within the Scotland and represent a key opportunity for landscape restoration. This project is an inspiring example of implementing nature-based solutions at the landscape scale and with long-term planning. This will help enable benefits for nature and people to be maintained and enhanced into the future, will improve the resilience of habitats, species and ecosystem services to climate change, and will enable interactions between habitats to be nurtured.