Jeremy Leggett – Keynote Speaker

Jeremy is a social entrepreneur currently running a pioneering rewilding project in the Highlands of Scotland. He previously founded Solarcentury (1998-2020), one of the world’s most respected solar energy companies, winner of a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation, sold to Statkraft in 2020. He also founded SolarAid (2006-2020 as chair), an international charity set up with a levy on annual Solarcentury profits, winner of a BITC Unilever Global Development Award. An Entrepreneur of the Year at the New Energy Awards, he was the first Hillary Laureate for International Leadership in Climate Change, has won a Gothenburg Prize, and was the first non-Dutch winner of a Royal Dutch Honorary Sustainability Award.

After taking a D.Phil in Earth Science at the University of Oxford, he taught at the Imperial College of Science and Technology (1978-1989). He was scientific director of the climate campaign at Greenpeace (1990-1996), and has been an occasional lecturer on courses in business and environment at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and St Gallen (Switzerland).

He has written four books about the climate crisis, as he has experienced it on the front lines for three decades. After 18 months of natural-capital verification-science work on the Bunloit estate in Inverness-shire, his rewilding project is now helping to take rewilding in the Highlands of Scotland to scale, via a company, Highlands Rewilding Ltd, which will own and operate a portfolio of rewilding land, working closely with local communities, beginning with the Beldorney estate in Aberdeenshire.