Inga Ķuze and Hans von Sonntag | 21.03. 2025
Above: Paul Leadbitte presents his strategies for rewetting and restoring the peatlands of the Great North Bog, North Pennines, UK, at the UN Innovation Lab in London in May 2023.
Paul Leadbitter is the Peatland Programme Manager for the North Pennines National Landscape team, a member of Eurosite. He’s an expert in peatland restoration with an impressive record of restored peatlands. Paul’s approach to peatland rewetting and restoration can best be described as entrepreneurial. The interview took place in March 2025.
Inga: If you had to sum up your career in one sentence, how would you sum it up?
Paul: One of the things I often put in my presentations is a picture of my kids. And when I talk about why peatlands are important or why nature is important, I go through all the reasons, and the last one is a picture of my three kids when they were young. I can remember when I was a teenager, I wrote an essay about the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, and it was what got me interested in nature conservation. I was a Greenpeace member, but ultimately, my career path in one sentence can be summed up as “trying to make a better future for younger generations”. It is about future generations and the intrinsic value of nature. That’s why I do what I do.
Hans: Lovely, I could not have said it better if I were you! Conservation work can be tough. What keeps you going when things get difficult?
Paul: There’s a lot of depressing news; there always has been. I’ve done nothing but conservation work my entire career. I went from working at fast food restaurants in high school, attended university and then went straight into conservation. I’ve done nothing but. What ultimately motivates me is trying to make a difference. I don’t get depressed. I get angry, and I get motivated by my anger. Some people think I’m unusual because of that, but you hear something depressing on the news about, I don’t know, perhaps a new world leader, and you think, okay, well, I’m just going to try harder because of it! I’m motivated by that. It doesn’t depress me; it motivates me. I guess I’m odd that way.
Hans: Paul, you are not working for an NGO, right? You are working for a different kind of organisation. Could you explain a bit more about that?
Paul: I work for the North Pennines National Landscape. It is not an NGO; we are a protected area, one of the national landscapes in the UK. The North Pennines National Landscape team works to conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the area. We focus on nature recovery and helping people to make an emotional connection with nature. We operate like an NGO, we have the same ethos and ideas as an NGO, and our legally accountable body is Durham County Council.
Stepping Outside the Conservation Bubble
Inga: Shall we look back in the history when you started? How was nature conservation and restoration in the North Pennines, and what were the biggest challenges at that time?
Paul: I started this job 19 years ago last month, and when I came here, it was a three-year project to try and win the hearts and minds of people about peat, basically. Peatland was seen as an uncharismatic, unlovable, dangerous wasteland. My job was to attempt to change that. Since then we’ve raised £40 million and restored 50,000 hectares of peatlands in the North Pennines and have become one of the biggest peatland programmes in the UK.
Hans: Did you have a long-term vision from the beginning, or did things evolve organically to the scale of what’s happening now?
Paul: When I came here, I had to write a business plan for this new peatland project, and during that business plan development, we looked at the entire North Pennines peat body and realized how big it was and how much it had been drained and damaged over the years. When we told the story about why peatlands are important – carbon, biodiversity, water quality, water supply, and so on – we found a lot of interest in it. I think one of my strengths is recognising opportunities and the right collaborators. You know, my personal interest is music and I play a guitar and guitarists have this term “playing by ear”. You play by ear; you show me how to play three or four chords, and that’s kind of all I need to play the song. I don’t need to know all the details, and that’s very much how I’ve taken this – a bit by intuition, a bit by spotting opportunities and with a lot of action. I’m not one of those who need to have everything planned out in immense detail. I’m much more “let’s see what happens and then look for opportunities as you go”, but I am also a big believer in acting early and always looking ahead to develop new projects.
Inga: I want to pick up on what you said about collaboration and going outside of our “bubble”.
Paul: My personality is quite entrepreneurial, and perhaps in order to keep things interesting, I try to look for new ideas/concepts so when green finance began to develop, I was interested in tapping into that. I do think that the state of nature globally is a market failure and as such the capitalist system needs to actively support the work we do to help deal with some of the global challenges we have. The biodiversity crisis and climate change crisis are essentially because of over consumption, and we’re all part of that system, and we need to work with each other.
Turning Challenges into Motivation
Hans: Looking ahead, where do you think the peatland in restoration will be in 10 years or so?
Paul: In the North Pennines, I think we’ve done about half of the restoration work in 19 years, so there is roughly a similar amount to do. And now we work across the Great North Bog coalition, which brings together the protected landscapes and NGOs working across the uplands of northern England, where in the next year or two, we’ll have a clear idea of what’s left to do. I really hope that the carbon markets will be much more active than they are now, and I’m hoping that the biodiversity markets will be in a similar way, and we will have more corporates actively supporting the work that we do across the Great North Bog. I hope that peatlands and their restoration will become mainstreamed with the private sector.
Inga: I was thinking about the business of restoration. There are a lot of views and opinions. Where do you stand on the discussion about the balance between ecological integrity and financial sustainability?
Paul: Typically, nature restoration has been financed by the public purse, and the public purse is not big enough nor should be expected to pay for it all. Therefore, developing a mechanism by which we can access private sector financing is a good option. However, when you commoditise something, reduce it down to pounds and pence or euro and cents, that could be dangerous because it leads to a discussion on how much a frog is worth versus a bumblebee versus a stream. How do you prioritise that? There is a risk in doing that, and the conservation community needs to be at the table with a strong voice to define what is acceptable and what is not.
Navigating the Finance World as a Conservationist
Hans: How did you navigate the financial world?
Paul: I don’t necessarily know the answer, a bit like playing by ear. I’m not a financial expert; my background is in geography, and I have a master’s degree in forestry. I listen when a corporate calls us. I sit down with them and listen to what they have to say, trying to figure out what they want and develop that. You develop the relationship based on what their corporate needs are and what they want; you’re honest, you’re clear, you’re transparent.
Hans: How does it happen that they call you?
Paul: I don’t know what to say about that! I jokingly say to my friends and my colleagues that it’s because I phone back. Half of the battle is answering, isn’t it? Then what seems to happen is you get a bit of profile, your name gets out there a little bit, you get in the media and on Google searches. It is a bit like how my Dad made his living. My Dad was a carpenter, and he built kitchens. His work was always based on the quality of his work and word of mouth. My Dad’s name is Mick, so Mick is great at building and installing kitchens, talk to Mick if you want a kitchen. My Dad made a living based on his reputation and ability to deliver. So, if you deliver on the ground, you build trust, you get a reputation, you get a bit more profile, you build more trust, more reputation, more profile, you attend events to showcase your work such as Eurosite events, you get European connections and onward it goes. Networking is not just a badge; it’s an actual thing you have to do, and whenever I go anywhere for work, I use it as an opportunity to come back with something new I’ve learned and someone new whom I can contact. There are lots of people out there doing lots of good work, and you try to help each other because helping is a great way to move relationships forward.
Closing Thoughts
Hans: If you were your younger self or you would meet somebody young, what would you tell them as advice in the conservation sector? How would you tell them to start their journey?
Paul: This is easy. Two words: green finance. If I was 18 again, and I could be taking university courses in green financing.
Inga: You are going to be hosting a very important event this year in June – the European Conservation Finance Bootcamp. Can you tell me what to expect?
Paul: What I really like about the Conservation Finance Bootcamp is that it is geared towards a specific audience – conservation practitioners across the Europe, so we can help them understand what green finance is, what it isn’t, and how to upskill them, connect them, and offer a platform by which they can create new projects. I’ve been to two Boot Camps, and I found them really helpful because there’s a lot to learn. It is a three-day event with a focus on green finance, and it can help you find match funding for your project or develop new relationships in the conservation and or the corporate sector. It is just an amazing opportunity, and I can’t speak highly enough about these events.
Inga: Thank you, Paul!