Meet the Yorkshire biodiversity champion who is on a mission to bring wildlife back to the UK

“I’ve always been interested in nature and birds. I remember seeing my first osprey at the age of about six, which was unheard of, at a place called Swithland Reservoir.”

Professor David Hill CBE has achieved the rare thing most of us dream about – making a career out of his childhood passion.

The self-described ‘overly-energetic’ founder and chairman of York-based Environment Bank is on a lifelong mission to improve biodiversity across the UK.

Born in Derbyshire in 1958, Hill went on to study ecology at Loughborough University. He gained a doctorate in ecology from the University of Oxford.

After spending more than 20 years working in the planning and development control sector, working on environmental impact assessments for residential and commercial developments, he felt the need to do more.

He set up Environment Bank in York in 2006 to introduce the concept of compensation, via biodiversity offsetting, net gain and habitat banking, into the UK.

“I was fed up that no biodiversity of any material value was being delivered or even taken account of,” he says.

The UK has lost 60 per cent of its biodiversity since 1970, according to the 2019 State of Nature report.

After 14 years of lobbying the government, Hill finally made a breakthrough in 2021 when the new Environment Act was introduced, which made biodiversity net gain mandatory for new developments and infrastructure projects.

The Environment Bank model leases land from the landowner and helps them turn that into space for habitat under a 30-year contract. In return, it owns the biodiversity credits from that land. It sells those credits to developers to help developments be more sustainable.

“In the past, typically a developer of a housing scheme would employ ecologists to carry out surveys and they would generally conclude that there would be no likely impact on biodiversity,” Hill says.

“They would create some habitat near the edge of the development and invariably that area would just get disturbed.

“"You get more biodiversity bang for your buck if you’ve got bigger sites that aren’t disturbed and where the wildlife can thrive.”

Ahead of the Environment Act becoming law, Hill realised he needed to raise some ‘serious finance’ to enable Environment Bank to grow and deliver this capacity.

He hired former Natural England boss James Cross as chief executive and together they secured a multi-million pound investment from specialist private equity firm Gresham House.

They put together a fund of £220m to create habitat banks – parcels of land between 20 and 500 hectares – where habitats are restored, created, or enhanced. They are now in the process of rolling those out across the UK.

In just a few months, Environment Bank has set up 26 habitat banks and plans to have more than 180 within the next two or three years.

There are three in Yorkshire so far – two in Harrogate and one in Doncaster. All are grassland sites that have been heavily grazed by sheep. Within a year or two, the land will be transformed into wildflower meadows.

“The transformations will be dramatic,” says Hill. “But farmers will still be able to cut their new field for hay and also graze it with really interesting cattle.”

By 2042, the Government wants to see 500,000 hectares of additional wildlife-rich habitat, outside of protected sites, created or restored.

“With biodiversity net gain we will start to bear down on the biodiversity loss issue but in the longer term we believe the corporate sector will need to engage in biodiversity recovery,” says Hill.

In the same way that developers can buy biodiversity net gain credits from Environment Bank, businesses will be able to buy units of biodiversity restoration in large habitat banks, motivated by incoming regulatory pressure and investor pressure.

“We believe the Government will achieve its goal of 500,000 hectares in 20-25 years but it will need the corporate support,” says Hill.

The married father-of-three grown up children is also doing his bit at home. He owns part of Muker Meadows, a special conservation area in Swaledale. He also owns 100 acres of restored hay meadows at his home in Nidderdale.

“They have a very rich invertebrate population and we’ve had about 78 bird species so far, which is great,” he says.

Hill was a founding member of Natural England, the Government's statutory adviser on natural heritage.

He is currently chairman of the Northern Upland Nature Partnership and is a board trustee of the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. He also sits on the Food Farming and Countryside Commission.

As the chairman of Plantlife, which promotes the conservation of plants, he got to know King Charles III who is patron of the charity.

“He’s ultra-amazing as an individual,” says Hill. “He’s always ahead of the game in terms of where the new ideas are coming from.”

When King – then Prince – Charles presented Hill with his CBE in 2015, they had a chat about what to do about the population of the Curlew wading bird.

Meanwhile, Environment Bank is growing apace. It currently has 42 staff and will have more than doubled this to 93 by the end of 2023.

Turnover is about £4.5m but the big growth and profit is expected to come in 2024 when the sales start to come through.

“It’s a good story,” says Hill. “I hear myself talking about it and I think ‘wow’, it’s an extraordinary journey.”