A new Scottish investment company built to “pair nature recovery at scale with affordable rural housing” has been launched.

NatureProsperity says it aims to “channel serious, long-term capital into nature recovery” and launches with four initial investees: Highlands Rewilding, the Scottish nature-recovery company, and MAKAR, the affordable timber-homes builder, in both of which it will hold significant stakes, together with two new companies it is establishing in forestry and in community building.

NatureProsperity is the third venture of its founder, Jeremy Leggett, the earth scientist who built the solar company Solarcentury before its sale to Norway’s Statkraft in 2020, and who founded the solar-lighting charity SolarAid. He now aims to replicate those successes in nature.

“The model has a name: the Nature Prosperity Pump,” said MAKAR.

“Carbon is drawn down into growing woodland; sustainable forestry turns part of that growth into timber; the timber is manufactured into affordable wooden homes; and those homes are built in the rural economy, housing the workforce needed to reverse biodiversity loss.

“Investment flows in, and nature recovery, homes and community benefit flow out.”

Leggett, founder of NatureProsperity and chief executive of Highlands Rewilding, said: “The timber we grow in biodiverse forests feeds house manufacturing, houses made of wood that are affordable.

“Those houses are deployed at scale in the rural economy, and they provide homes for the workforce that, vitally, is going to be needed if we are going to hit the national targets in reversing biodiversity collapse. That’s the pump, the Nature Prosperity Pump.”

Neil Edgar of MAKAR said: “We are proud to be involved. Our timber-rich homes have been developed and honed for over two decades and, with the investment NatureProsperity can bring, we will be able to deliver at scale, within thriving rural landscapes, making a very real contribution to solving the rural housing crisis and building local communities.”

MAKAR builds its homes from locally sourced Scottish timber, which is milled and precision-manufactured to lock away around one tonne of CO2 per cubic metre.

MAKAR’s precision off-site manufacturing system, currently capable of producing up to 30 homes per year, is designed to scale in step with growing demand for Scottish-timber housing.