In the middle of Tasmania sits a 5,000-hectare property once used for sheep grazing and crop growing.
It’s known as “the Quoin” — an architectural term for the external corner of a building.
It takes its name from the Jurassic-era dolerite cliffs at the property’s entrance.
At dusk each evening, hundreds of forester kangaroos march from the woodlands to the grassy flats to graze.
Once it gets dark, Tasmanian devils and other nocturnal creatures venture out.
And it’s common to spot a mother pademelon with a joey in tow.
More than a century of agricultural activity has degraded parts of the landscape.
But once the sheep farmers left, an unlikely buyer moved in — who wanted to restore the land, not farm it.
The Earth is experiencing extraordinary biodiversity loss, with the United Nations warning immediate action is needed to avoid ecosystem collapse.
In Australia and around the world, pioneering experiments are underway to use private finance and privately owned land to regenerate valuable environments.
Wedgetail is a private company investing in projects around the world that restore ecologically valuable areas.
It was founded by Lisa Miller, who purchased the Quoin in 2021.
A zoologist by training, Ms Miller said the property contained a variety of different ecosystems.
“The Quoin is a patchwork landscape of areas that are in relatively good condition, and areas that have been quite degraded,” she said.
Many threatened plant and animal species call the Quoin home, but so do feral deer and introduced grasses that prevent the native species from thriving.
Restoring the property is a challenging and costly task, made possible by an incredibly successful business venture.
Ms Miller is married to billionaire Cameron Adams, the co-founder of Canva — a popular online graphic design tool.
According to Forbes Magazine, he’s Australia’s 25th richest person.
The couple is investing much of their fortune in conservation.
“We’ve been able to take some of that capital, and we really wanted to deploy it against our mission around improving outcomes for biodiversity and nature loss in conjunction with climate change,” Ms Miller said.
Wedgetail also gives loans to businesses that are having a positive impact on the landscape, and grants to non-profit organisations regenerating valuable areas.
Ms Miller said Wedgetail’s approach was to test out and “de-risk” business models that support the viability and profitability of private conservation work.
Once Wedgetail has done the expensive work of figuring out the best business models, others can follow.
“When you’re de-risking and experimenting and being a research and development lab, you can’t necessarily make a really sustainable business model,” Ms Miller said.
There are plans to make the Quoin financially sustainable through ecotourism as well as biodiversity and carbon credits — offsetting programs which reward landowners who improve biodiversity or manage vegetation to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The Quoin is also experimenting with emerging technologies to accelerate regeneration efforts, such as the use of drones for landscape mapping, alongside researchers at the University of Tasmania.
It’s a job usually done through field surveys — people walking around the site observing and collecting data.
“That can be really, really time consuming,” University of Tasmania researcher Alice Robbins said.
Instead, Ms Robbins uses a small drone, with a camera attached, to capture thousands of individual photos each flight.
“Drones have this unique role to play, and they fill this scale gap between field-based techniques and then satellites,” she said.
“With a drone, you can cover a reasonable area, maybe like 10 to 60 hectares in a 20-to-40-minute flight, so you’re really being quite time efficient.”
Ms Robbins puts the photos through software that stitches them all together to produce what’s called an orthomosaic — a continuous image of a section of the property.
She then creates a false colour composite, which makes it easier to assess the health of the vegetation.
“In this particular case study, we’ll be looking at change over time,” Ms Robbins said.
“We were here in May and we mapped the system before any land management works had been done.
“And since then, there’s been a cool burn, which quite noticeably burnt the vegetation down, and then some preparation works for their active plantings that will be happening over the next year.
“We’ll be looking at, can we map the growth of those plantings, and can you see that connectivity increasing?”
In September this year, the Quoin began an official partnership with the University of Tasmania.
“Our role is to provide the supporting science to understand what the great work that is being done on this property is achieving,” vice-chancellor Rufus Black said.
“It’s a rare opportunity to be able to work at really substantial scale, to see the regeneration of a landscape, to be able to contribute to it … but also to understand how this landscape evolves as it gets cared for and starts to regenerate.”
In addition to the drone project, the university is also experimenting with translocating eastern quolls on the property, with the aim to improve survival outcomes for the declining species.
“The good thing is this is a hope story,” he said.
“This is about, how can we actually turn around damage that’s happened? How can we create a better future for our landscapes and the amazing creatures that are in it?”
About 14,000 kilometres from Tasmania, another project linked to Wedgetail is underway — this one in central America.
The tropical dry forest on the Azuero Peninsula in Panama has suffered extensive deforestation due to cattle grazing.
It’s the only place you can find Azuero spider monkeys, which are critically endangered due to habitat loss and capture for the pet trade.
Conservation group Pro Eco Azuero is reforesting an 80-kilometre ecological corridor in collaboration with about 600 landowners — cattle ranchers who have pledged parts of their land to the initiative.
It means disconnected patches of forest are gradually being stitched together.
When the ABC spoke with executive director Sandra Vasquez, she had spent the day building bridges for spider monkeys to travel safely between the forests.
“Biodiversity is coming back, we see it in the monkey population,” she said.
She said cattle owners were suffering due to climate change and deforestation, which were reducing the productivity of their land.
“We’ve gotten so much momentum after working for 15 years with them, and we’re in a different position as of before when we went door to door, knocking and saying, ‘Hey, do you want to reforest with us? Please?'” she said.
“Now they [farmers] are the ones looking for us, because they’ve been hit so hard by climate change and economically.”
Pro Eco Azuero has no financial help from the Panama government, so relies on grants and donations.
Wedgetail gave a grant to Pro Eco Azuero to plant 20,000 native and fruit trees in a 20-hectare area of the corridor.
“They have helped us to scale up a lot of our work,” Ms Vasquez said.
“They’re going to help us for five years to restore a very strategic piece of land where we really wanted to close a gap.”
From the United Nations office in Geneva, Ivo Mulder is part of a team that is finding ways to stimulate private investment in reforestation and sustainable agriculture in developing countries.
“We often look at governments to solve the problems, but people also need to look in a mirror at themselves and see what they can do with their own money,” he said.
“There needs to be a change in how the economy works, how money is being invested, and there are big improvements to be made given that global emissions continue to increase.”
Mr Mulder said private investors were not currently major contributors to restoration efforts, but “pioneers” such as Wedgetail may prove nature-based solutions can be profitable.
“Lots of investors are much more hesitant about the underlying business case, the risk involved and the stability or instability of the cash flows,” he said.
“The moment that becomes clear, the moment that there is a track record, I would believe that the private investments will also scale up quite rapidly.”
He said governments could help stimulate private investment in nature by putting “constructive policies in place”, such as taxing activities which negatively impact nature and the climate.
Some of Wedgetail’s work, such as the grant to Pro Eco Azuero, is philanthropic.
And by design, the organisation is losing money from the Quoin.
But Ms Miller said Wedgetail’s “venture” side — loans to businesses in industries such as coffee, cacao and agroforestry — was profitable.
“When we do nature-linked loans, they definitely are into businesses that are commercially viable, who are growing and making money but also having good outcomes on their landscape,” she said.
“Many of our models are around, ‘how do you reach that business sustainability and that environmental sustainability together?'”
There are plans to open the Quoin up to the public through bushwalks, on-site accommodation and educational opportunities.
“Ecotourism is one of the things we’ll be investigating,” Lisa Miller said.
“We do also plan to connect with the university more and have more of their students out as well as students from high schools around the state.”
Ms Miller said part of the Quoin’s mission was to create a sustainable income source for workers and the local economy, as well as connecting people to nature.
“This is definitely not ‘lock-it-up’ conservation,” she said.
Credits:
- Reporting, photography and digital production: Ashleigh Barraclough
- Photography, video and drone: Morgan Timms
- Additional photography: Luke Bowden
- Video production: Magie Khameneh
- Digital editor: Daniel Miller
