How victory for Donald Trump in US election would fundamentally change Scottish countryside

Two events in the first week of November will have major bearing on the outcome of this quiet drama. On November 1, the result of the 16th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) will be announced. Then on November 6, the outcome of the US presidential election will be clear. That event may seem unrelated, until one considers the diametrically opposed attitudes of the two contenders on the environment and the role of international treaties.

Hugely ambitious

COP16, now underway in Columbia, is the first review meeting for a vital treaty signed in 2022, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In this agreement, widely described as the “Paris Agreement of Nature”, the vast majority of governments pledged to stop biodiversity collapse by 2030 and substantively reverse it by 2050. These targets are hugely ambitious, but they are desperately needed. Catalogues of biodiversity collapse include the 2024 Living Planet Report, which records that between 1970 and 2020 the size of global wildlife populations plummeted by 73 per cent on average.

To hit the Kunming-Montreal targets, a nature-recovery market will need to be built worldwide, and especially in nations ripe for nature restoration, like Scotland. Philanthropy and public finance will be able to bankroll only a small part of this. Nature will have to be given value, and financed accordingly by the vast pools of capital held by private financial institutions, such as pension funds.

The UN estimates the shortfall in global investment for nature recovery to be $700 billion a year. The Green Finance Institute estimates that Scotland alone will need around £20bn by 2030. These are huge sums, but they would save even more in avoided economic losses if global biodiversity continues to collapse. How then would we feed the majority of the global population? How to put a value on that?

Great benefit to Scotland

A failure at COP16 will be a major setback for efforts to raise the capital needed to make the nature-recovery market take off. In contrast, a success on the scale of the breakthrough at the 2015 climate COP in Paris would hold the potential to energise the market, and investors in it, and potentially do so in short order.

That outcome would have great benefits for the rural economy in Scotland. Hundreds of millions of pounds would flow into it. Nature recovery requires a large and nationally dispersed rural workforce. Serious efforts to reverse Scotland’s biodiversity collapse would require reversal in parallel of the national emergency in affordable rural housing. It would help enormously with the Scottish Government’s repopulation ambitions.

Two hundred governments are at COP16. It is worrying that only 32 of them and the European Union have so far submitted the national plans they promised two years ago. In the world as it is today, most governments do not seem to have a liveable planet high on their agendas. This despite the manifestly existential threat that impelled them to agree the Kunming-Montreal treaty in 2022. Recently, for example, the UK Foreign Secretary described biodiversity collapse as a global threat worse than terrorism.

Trashing the environment

On November 5, just four days after the closure of COP16, the US presidential election takes place. If Donald Trump wins, the very future of rules-based societies will be at risk, in the rising tide of authoritarianism his success would encourage.

Far-right politicians do not generally care about the global environment, and indeed most wear the trashing of it as a red badge of their belief system. Most investors simply react to what governments do, rather than meaningfully trying to influence them in the direction of a liveable future.

That is why billions of pounds today flow into the destruction of nature, not its recovery. Clean energy stocks, for example, have lost almost 60 per cent of their value since their peak in 2021. Oil and gas stocks, in the same period, have risen steeply, despite everything we know about the ruinous impact of oil and gas companies on climate and biodiversity.

But if Kamala Harris wins the election, hope for progress will live on. Her platform includes action on global environmental threats, and respect for the multilateral treaties aimed at reversing them. Her success would encourage like-minded governments. Financial institutions would ignore the scope for momentum in new markets in nature at their peril.

Nature-based economy

So the best outcome for Scotland on Bonfire Night, and especially rural Scotland, would be a Paris-type breakthrough at COP16 plus a Harris victory. That would potentially breathe life into the emblem-for-hope that our nation could become in nature recovery, by boosting our investability. A failure at COP16 plus a Trump victory could well build a bonfire for what remains of Scotland’s biodiversity.

The Scottish nature-recovery company I founded in 2021, Highlands Rewilding, is currently seeking to help lead the way in bringing investment from private financial institutions into the rural economy for nature recovery.

We are facing an uphill struggle, as most who target system change do. If things go badly in the first week of November, the slope may become unclimbable, for us and other pioneers like us. But if they go well, hope will live on for a prosperous new nature-based Scottish economy.

Dr Jeremy Leggett is founder and chief executive of Highlands Rewilding, and a member of the Scottish Government’s Market Framework Advisory Group