Worldwide, multiple initiatives are underway to regenerate landscapes while mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved landscape integrity is vital for ecosystem functions that support food, water, habitat, emissions reductions, and environmental security.1 Flourishing ecosystems also contribute to community livelihoods and connections. This Community-Based Landscape Regeneration Toolkit provides resources for facilitating community-oriented approaches to landscape regeneration. The toolkit focuses on initiatives underway in the UK, particularly Scotland. Compiled over two years of intensive research in the Scottish Highlands as part of the Centre for Landscape Regeneration initiative at the University of Cambridge,2 the toolkit includes findings from interviews, a review of related toolkits, mapping workshops and site visits undertaken as part of a co-design research process. Kingussie viewpoint. David Brown, 2024.

In January 2026, the Scottish parliament passed a ‘landmark’ nature restoration bill to provide a legal basis for restoring Scotland’s landscapes.3 With this law, the government aims to tackle the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises by scaling up woodland creation and peatland restoration by 10 per cent annually until 2030. These efforts are central to Scotland’s Climate Change Plan (2026-2040), which relies on

1 UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). ‘Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: A national security assessment’.

2 The project is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council’s ‘Changing the Environment’ programme and is based at the. University of Cambridge (NE/W00495X/1). For more information, see https://www.clr.conservation.cam.ac.uk and https://planetarypraxis.org/projects/land-regeneration.

3 Scottish Government, “Landmark Nature Restoration Bill passed”.

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emissions reductions from land-use changes to meet net-zero targets.4 These efforts also align with the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy, which commits to being ‘nature-positive’ by 2030 and to restoring and regenerating biodiversity across the country by 2045.5 As a result, these plans require significant bold action and scaling up of landscape restoration across Scotland. However, so far, progress has lagged behind ambition. While the government has increasingly sought to leverage private finance to fund landscape-scale restoration, as reflected in the growing number of land purchases based on natural capital and carbon markets and speculative private investments, recent economic research has highlighted the pitfalls of this approach and the need to pursue alternative public funding for restoration.6

Projects to regenerate landscapes can take place at a range of scales and by a diversity of actors, but barriers to restoration at scale remain in Scotland and beyond. At times, these initiatives are established and sustained by large landowners, national parks, eNGOs and/or governmental agencies. Landownership in Scotland, particularly rural landownership, is highly concentrated.7 While these patterns of land ownership are sometimes seen to facilitate nature restoration at scale, the evidence has thus far provided a more mixed picture. Notably, woodland planting and peatland restoration outcomes have consistently fallen short of annual targets. Landowners often have divergent interests and hold significant power over how land is used and managed, which may or may not align with biodiversity and climate targets, and can change when new landowners take possession. Conflicts can also arise between strands of land reform and nature restoration, with heightened concerns about the buying up of land in the name of natural capital and carbon sequestration8.

4 Scottish Government, Scotland’s Climate Change Plan: 2026–2040.

5 Scottish Government, Scottish Biodiversity Strategy to 2045.

6 Wheatley and Macfarlane, Restoring Nature to Deliver a Just Transition to Net Zero.

7 Wightman, Who Owns Scotland 2024.

8 McIntosh, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Carbon: Natural Capital, the Private Finance Investment Pilot and Scotland’s Land Reform

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Coire na Ciste. Jennifer Gabrys, 2025.

At the same time, globally, there is a growing understanding that people and communities must be central to ambitions to regenerating landscapes, with calls for restoration and rewilding initiatives to integrate social and ecological goals and incorporate social goals and to prioritise community engagement as part of more holistic visions9. These are understood to be necessary for not only developing more equitable approaches to nature restoration but also to build more enduring long-term success of projects and initiatives taking place within communities. In Scotland, there are increasing attempts by policy-makers and practitioners in the field to engage with a more integrative, people-centric approach to restoration, particularly important where the ‘empty’ Highland landscapes have been romanticised over the centuries10.

The drive to restore nature in Scotland takes place in a context in which land reform has been developing over the last three decades.11 There has been growth in community-based initiatives focused on climate and nature restoration, including through

9 Erbaugh, et al., « Global forest restoration and the importance of prioritizing local communities. », and Fox and Cundill, « Towards increased community-engaged ecological restoration: A review of current practice and future directions”.

10 Martin et al., « Taming rewilding-from the ecological to the social: How rewilding discourse in Scotland has come to include people. » Deary and Warren, « Divergent visions of wildness and naturalness in a storied landscape: Practices and discourses of rewilding in Scotland’s wild places. »

11 Danson and Burnett. « Current Scottish land reform and reclaiming the commons: Building community resilience”, Doyle, « Rethinking communities, land and governance: Land reform in Scotland and the community ownership model, and Macfarlane, Land Reform for a Democratic, Sustainable and Just Scotland.

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community action groups, development trusts, non-profits or community groups owning assets and land. Whether through self-initiated projects or with larger organisations, community groups create and run land regeneration projects as an important way for people to reconnect to the land, rebuild relationships with environments and build alternative livelihoods within emerging green economies. Our findings show that many residents express a need for greater connection to the land, which includes ‘re-peopling’ rural areas to halt population decline as people move to urban centres.

Anagach Woods. Jennifer Gabrys, 2025.

However, communities are not always able to readily engage in landscape regeneration projects or develop them at larger scales. In this sense, when engaging with or undertaking landscape regeneration, there are wider political and socio-economic challenges beyond the purview and control of communities, including land ownership and land reform. Although community-led approaches and initiatives operate at more local levels, there is the potential for them to contribute important cumulative and collaborative approaches to landscape regeneration. This toolkit highlights the role and significance of community-led networks and plans, while also cultivating practices that facilitate landscape regeneration from the ground up.

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Insh Woods. Jennifer Gabrys, 2025.

In the process of undertaking this research, we have been guided by five key questions, which inform the findings and recommendations we present in this toolkit:

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How can access to the land, by and for communities, be more democratic?

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How can social and economic infrastructures be developed to enable and sustain community-based landscape regeneration?

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How do communities generate capacities and resources to engage with landscape regeneration and become self-sustaining?

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How can community involvement in landscape regeneration become more inclusive and influential?

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How can democratic renewal be combined with ecological renewal? To address these questions, we have held semi-structured interviews with people with connections to the Cairngorms, including farmers and crofters, community-based organisations and community woodlands, development trusts, mountaineering and outdoor tourism professionals, youth conservation groups, renewable energy experts, third-sector organisations, elected representatives and policy bodies. We asked questions related to the role of communities in landscape regeneration and the factors which may enable or constrain community-led approaches to landscape regeneration, while keeping the conversations open to further discussion that the questions might not have addressed.

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Mapping workshop, June 2025. Jennifer Gabrys Mapping workshop, June 2025. Jennifer Gabrys Subsequently, we undertook a series of in-person and online participatory mapping workshops with the above groups. These sessions included asking participants about the perceived benefits and barriers of community engagement in landscape

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regeneration, which they could locate on a map of the Cairngorms, while also making proposals for good practices going forward. In parallel, we undertook a scan of existing initiatives and toolkits focused on enabling community-based landscape regeneration and aligned projects. We developed a database of 43 toolkit cases, primarily based in Scotland and the UK. We identified key attributes across the toolkits, including focus and objectives, key actors, co-design and network building components, and intended impacts and outcomes.

In the sections below, we provide insights from our research on the role of communities in landscape regeneration. In the course of this research and collective conversations, we have learned about a number of inspiring community initiatives that are transforming and enhancing land and livelihoods in the Cairngorms and beyond. At the same time, research participants have identified several concerns and challenges that can impede community involvement or benefits from landscape regeneration. We outline these challenges in our key findings and identify ways existing initiatives are working to address and overcome current limitations. Our key findings inform the toolkit’s structure, providing a resource and record of collective conversations about community-based projects underway, the strategies they have adopted, the challenges they have faced, and the relative successes and shortcomings of the projects.

We discuss five landscape regeneration stories that show how diverse community projects in the Cairngorms are implementing projects to improve land access, align land and livelihoods, build community capacities, strengthen engagement, and combine democratic and ecological renewal. These offer more in-depth insights into the project findings and into case studies explored in the Cairngorms. Next, in the ‘Community and Environment Toolkits’ review, we provide an overview of toolkits and their salient characteristics. We analyse how toolkits can be a way for community, government and eNGO initiatives to gather resources and learnings to build community capacities for undertaking landscape regeneration projects. This review reflects on these projects, forming a sort of ‘toolkit of toolkits’ by collecting and synthesising resources and highlighting how these toolkits support community initiatives, while addressing existing gaps in the area.

Based on this research, we offer key recommendations, along with conclusions, references and resources to help synthesise and advance community-based landscape regeneration initiatives. We hope this toolkit can inform and advance practices that facilitate, support and empower community-based approaches to landscape regeneration. The toolkit is based on the view that when communities play a central role in these initiatives, more successful and equitable practices and outcomes can be realised through greater participation with, connection to and benefits from landscape initiatives.