£5-a-week heating bills? How super-efficient timber houses can transform Scotland – Jeremy Leggett
Timber homes are good for nature, the economy, the fight against climate change – and might even help protect democracy from the rise of the far-right
Two economies vie for Scotland’s future. One we know well: linear, extractive, predicated on burning fossil fuels and the depletion of soils, biodiversity and fresh water. It’s the economy that has carried us, with its thirst for quarterly returns and glossy GDP figures, into climate meltdown and biodiversity collapse. It is, increasingly clearly, the road to ruin.
The other is one we’re only beginning to glimpse, but which has been quietly assembling itself in parts of Scotland and beyond. It is circular, nature-based, and predicated on the hope-inspiring notion that you can grow human prosperity by restoring the living systems on which it depends. I call the driving mechanism of this economy ‘the nature prosperity pump’.
It starts like this. Scottish vegetation sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This already happens, obviously – we just need a lot more of it. Then that part of the vegetation that can be used for sustainable forestry is harvested to provide timber. This too already happens – but again we need to do more. The UK cannot remain the second-biggest importer of timber after China.
Next the timber is used to manufacture affordable, wooden housing – not just timber-frame, but entirely made of wood. This housing is then deployed at scale.
Carbon removed from atmosphere
As we do all this, we begin defusing three existential threats to a healthy economy. First, the sucking down into ecosystems of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, helps abate climate meltdown. The timber housing locks carbon away – around a tonne for every cubic metre of wood. It saves still more carbon, because if the houses are of the so-called Passivhaus standard, little or no fossil fuel needs to be burned to heat them. And the timber to make them doesn’t have to be transported far, again saving fossil-fuel emissions.
Second, timber housing can be made affordably, helping to dismantle our dire national housing emergency. We cannot do that by expanding house numbers using the construction industry’s current carbon-intensive materials.
Third, crucially – and this is how the pump closes – deploying timber housing at scale provides homes for the workforce needed if nature recovery is to be undertaken at the landscape scale needed to hit national targets on reversing biodiversity collapse and cutting climate risk. This requires the full panoply of nature recovery: in woods, peatland, pastures, soils, rivers and all the offshore environments where so much carbon can be stored – in kelp, seagrass, and salt marsh.
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Outdoor jobs to replace those lost to AI
The prosperity element of the pump springs from its many social and economic benefits. These start with jobs. A nature-based economy is job-rich, and most are outdoors. If we must lose jobs to AI in offices, then let’s win them back in nature – all the more so because of a second big benefit: mental health. The evidence that immersion in nature helps mental wellbeing is substantial and growing.
Employment-related benefits accrue rapidly. Skills training opportunities are legion: for joiners, self-builders, prisoners given a new purpose in rehabilitation, the list is long.
Another benefit involves energy bills. Passivhaus-standard homes have modelled heating costs of as little as £5 a week. In a world with soaring oil prices, saying this is invaluable is an understatement.
Then there are the opportunities for food self-sufficiency, in a rural economy where there are sufficient affordable homes to regenerate aging communities. Massive local vegetable and fruit production and processing operations become possible.
Getting venison into the food chain becomes easier when local larders can be stocked and staffed. And with that, the threat out-of-control deer populations pose to young trees diminishes, increasing the scope for rapid forestland growth, strengthening the nature prosperity pump. And so the virtuous circles go on. I count more than 60 social and economic benefits.
Growing a food forest
When I emigrated to Scotland six years ago, I invested all the money I made founding a successful solar energy company in two enterprises: Highlands Rewilding, a nature-recovery company of my own creation, and Makar, a timber housing manufacturer in Inverness. I was, in effect, trying to help show the way to the nature prosperity pump. Now, with the creation of my latest entrepreneurial enterprise, NatureProsperity Ltd, I’ll be trying to take that mission to the next level.
The South Bunloit estate, where I live, will become the NatureProsperity Resilience Reserve – a test-bed and exemplar for the nature prosperity pump. Highlands Rewilding is already managing the estate ready for the monetisation of natural capital: with carbon sequestered and biodiversity uplifted.
We are creating new woodland, restoring peatland, and growing a food forest. Makar will manufacture a small hamlet of timber homes for estate workers and use by community joint ventures, such as those we already have underway in mindfulness and vegetable growing.
If NatureProsperity is successful, there will be others. Everything on a resilience reserve will be monitored and measured, aiming to optimise social good, and in anticipation of the day that social value itself becomes monetisable.
Protecting democracy
Is it unimaginable, in an economy under existential threat from status quo practices, that the corporate world might be required by government to buy social credits, the same way it is required to buy carbon credits? I think not. Indeed, progressive companies might want to jump voluntarily in that direction, ahead of being pushed, so as to impress their stakeholders.
There is another rationale for transitioning to a nature-based circular economy. It is becoming increasingly clear that the linear, extractive economy is imperilling social cohesion.
Think of how oil dependency is driving world disorder today. Where social cohesion is imperilled, the far-right rises and the prospect of full fascism with them. A nature-based, resilient economy foments social cohesion. It protects democracy. It reduces the prospect of war, international or civil.
Scotland is perfectly positioned to lead the way.
Jeremy Leggett is a serial social entrepreneur and Scottish immigrant who won the 2025 Blue Planet Prize
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