Nature conservation often attracts people willing to endure physical privations for long stretches of time. In the case of two former British soldiers turned nature project developers, their challenges have also included Russian snipers, unexploded ordinance and minus 20 degree temperatures.

Angus Aitken and Jody Bragger, the co-founders of U.K.-based Tellus Conservation, have been operating in and out of Ukraine, often close to the front line of the war, since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Their work raising millions of dollars to conserve Ukraine’s forests and put out fires from Russian missiles has largely flown under the radar, but the pair are now aiming to raise far more money for the country through nature conservation projects that would stack carbon and biodiversity credits.

Bragger has had a long affinity for the country since travelling there in 2004 as a student journalist, and within a few weeks of Russia’s invasion, the Tellus co-founders were in Ukraine.

“Like many people, we were very keen on doing something to support Ukraine after the illegal Russian invasion,” says the 38-year-old Bragger, who in his earlier life as a soldier in the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards served in Afghanistan, Somalia and the West Bank.

“We realized that with a company like Tellus, we were in a unique position to be able to do something for a part of Ukrainian society that was probably being slightly overlooked,” Bragger told OPIS in a joint interview with Aitken. “Shortly after the invasion, we sent a message to the outgoing deputy minister of the environment and asked for her opinion on what was going on.”

“Overnight their extensive national park network, which contains a third of Europe’s biodiversity, lost funding,” says Bragger, referring to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) statistic that Ukraine has 35% of Europe’s biodiversity despite occupying less than 6% of the continent. Its wetlands also cover 4.5 million hectares, according to the CBD.

Ukraine has more than 80 parks and nature reserves, and Bragger believes its “beautiful wetlands, bear, wolf, lynx, bison” will provide the country with vital tourist revenues when the war is over.

But the immediate start of the war had devastating consequences for some of the country’s forests, and the Ukrainian government estimates that 3 million hectares of forests have been destroyed since 2021. A total of 139,000 square kilometres — twice the size of Azerbaijan — have been contaminated by explosives, it said in a news release published during COP29 to mark a thousand days of war.

Those areas dwarf the size of the land that the Ukrainian government has subsequently attempted to restore to nature and decontaminate.

Parks’ Loss of Employees and Equipment

Ukraine’s park network also lost a large number of its employees overnight, as many of its rangers had operational firearms experience and were some of the first to be conscripted, while their vehicles were also redeployed.

Ukraine’s economic output slumped by almost 30% in the wake of the invasion, while its military spending zoomed higher.

“We worked closely with a Ukrainian NGO [and] spent two weeks driving around nine of the national parks we now support,” said Bragger. “We included them in our funding portfolio because they contain the three major Ukrainian biodomes,” he says, referring to its famous wetlands, forests and grasslands, also known as steppe.

With the help of a “healthy donation” from a U.K.-based family office, Bragger says that Tellus was able to step in and provide crisis funding initially for nine parks, before a tenth was added later. Civil servants in the environment department were still being paid, so when Tellus raised $1.1 million in funding, the money went straight to the frontline of nature conservation, the co-founders say.

The money was channeled through the Nature Fund of Ukraine, which the two set up with the Frankfurt Zoological Society. Aitken is on the board, while Bragger is its chairman.

The first tranche of money funded “urgent ecological work such as removing invasive species from the steppe”, says Aitken, who is 33 years old. This required buying equipment such as brush-cutters, trimmers and chainsaws.

The money also covered operational support for a range of tasks: generators were required because of missile strikes on local power stations; fuel and vehicles were needed; and “some park staff were operating out of buildings where the roof is completely collapsed in, either just from old age or from damage sustained during the war,” says Aitken.

Aitken, a former Gurkha soldier in the British Army who served in Brunei, Malawi and Uganda, says he is particularly proud of Tellus’s role in boosting the skills of younger park rangers, helping them use the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART). The platform enables ecologists to map data from surveys of species and their habitats.

“It’s good for conservation and it’s aligning these Ukrainian national parks with the standard across the EU. We’re aligning what conservation looks like in Ukraine with what it looks like in the rest of Europe,” he tells OPIS. “It’s nice to see the next generation of nature conservationists, the younger members of the park staff using this tech.”

From Soldiers to Project Developers

Those who know the pair suggest their experiences as soldiers dovetail with their new lives as project developers.

“Their military backgrounds mean they have the deep understanding of the challenges associated with delivering complex projects at scale. They have the logistical wherewithal to deliver effective conservation,” says an employee at a prominent project developer who has known them for years.

“In the British military, particularly the unit I was in, the Gurkhas, you are always working across cultures, and I think that is crucial when it comes to developing these projects,” says Aitken.

The life of the soldier led to the life of a project developer, says Bragger: “The influence of my time in the military is what brought me to conservation.”

Threats to security are often closely linked to environmental problems, he suggests: “I saw firsthand how the drought in Somalia was used as a recruiting tool for [al-Qaeda affiliate] Al-Shabaab. Agricultural collapse and no income — it was very easy for [parts of the populace] to become radicalised.

“Environmental crises and security will become closely intertwined…The environmental changes that we are going through, whether it’s climate change or biodiversity loss is going to contribute to a less secure world. You’ve already seen this play out in the Sahel,” Bragger says.

Referring to Ukraine and Tellus’s other reforestation projects in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, he adds: “We can’t come to terms with biodiversity loss if we don’t work in these countries.”

Bragger and Aitken downplay the risks they have encountered in Ukraine during interviews before and during COP16, the recent biannual United Nations biodiversity summit held in Cali, Colombia. The Tellus co-founders are scrupulous to a fault in pointing out that whatever hardships or near misses they have experienced are not on the scale of those encountered by Ukraine’s people since 2022.

Asked about close calls, Bragger prefaces his remarks by saying: “In terms of near misses, I’m consciously aware that Ukrainians live with this every day.”

Six of the ten national parks funded by Tellus are away from the frontlines of the conflict. But it is clear that there is significant physical danger for Bragger, Aitken, Tellus’s staff and the Ukrainian park staff operating in the parks closer to the frontline.

During their spells in Ukraine, the Tellus founders have either stayed in or transited through Kiev, Kharkiv, Dnipro and other areas heavily bombarded with missiles.

They stayed in Ukraine over the most recent winter, and “access to power and running water was intermittent during the cold winter nights…Temperatures plunged down to minus 20 degrees,” says Bragger.

Kamianska Sich, one of the parks supported by Tellus, backed on to the Kakhovka Dam, which was destroyed in June 2023. “There was really heavy fighting going on in the national park,” according to Bragger. “We had outgoing and incoming artillery when we were there,” necessitating the use of body armor and helmets. “These are the conditions the Ukrainian park staff are working in every single day,” he adds.

“We were also tracked unfortunately by a small Russian drone…I don’t know why they were tracking us, but they snipered our building earlier that day when we got there,” says Bragger, matter-of-factly. “That’s the proximity, within sniper range, that some of the park staff are operating in. That is the lived experience of many Ukrainians on the frontline.”

There has also been online harassment. “I’ve had some pretty aggressive messaging on social media from what must be like a kind of St Petersburg bot farm,” says Bragger, an ultra-marathon runner who has recently recovered from cancer.

The equipment they have purchased has had a profound impact on protecting nature on the frontline.

“The day I left [Ukraine this summer], I got a report coming in saying that 1,500 hectares of one of our parks was on fire,” says Aitken. Missiles had torched a part of the forest, setting off fires, but the firefighting equipment brought to the park by Tellus put them out. Seeing videos of the equipment being used to stop the fires was a “really humbling thing”, he adds.

Tellus started working with a tenth park, Sviati Hori, or the Holy Mountains Park, more recently. “It’s really in the hot zone [and was] struggling with how much they were getting hit by the Russians…It forms the front line with Russia,” says Aitken. “It has had troops go back and forward over it. The Russians know that the foliage of the forests in provides some cover for Ukrainian troops and anyone moving around, and so they are really trying to burn down the forests.”

The largest wildfire in the park’s history ripped through it this September and was the result of an air strike that hit unexploded ordinance and land mines. Reuters recently reported that 14 forest rangers in the park have been killed by shelling, while Radio Free Europe quoted a state forestry official suggesting that returning the park to its pre-war condition will take between 50 and 70 years.

The biodiversity across the 406 sq km park has suffered with the people who live in and around the forest and its chalk mountains. The park is home to rare plant species, foxes, wolves, ten types of reptiles and bubo bubo eagle owls in addition to dwellings, some of which have been destroyed, and the damaged Sviatohirsky cave monastery.

“Nowhere’s really safe, particularly Sviati Hori,” says Aitken. “There are strikes on the main towns around there.”

Staff Face Power Cuts, Exhaustion and Danger

Both Tellus founders hail the resilience of their Ukrainian employees and the park rangers, who must deal with freezing winters and hot summers often without power, while family and friends serve on the front line.

“Yes, there is all this conservation work going on, and yes everyone is hard, resilient and adaptable, but I cross over and I get back into Poland and I start sleeping well for the first time in two months….I’m in NATO,” says Aitken. “They don’t get that, they just have to keep going.”

They have worked closely with two full-time Ukrainian employees, project coordinator Nastia Drapaliuk and project lead Nataliia Bohdan, who talked to OPIS during an hour-long interview at a time when the bombing of Ukrainian electricity infrastructure meant that power supplies to households were rationed to just three hours per day.

“They are the engine, heart and soul of this entire project,” says Aitken. “We could not have found two better people to do this with. Nastia has been working in this space for twenty-plus years. She has always wanted to found a nature fund of Ukraine.”

With the help of Tellus, Drapaliuk has achieved that ambition after previously working as head of department at the Ministry of Natural Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine for almost nineteen years.

“I have a shorter working history!” said Bohdan, who previously worked for deputies in Ukraine’s parliament, where she specialized in nature policy, and lectured at the Donetsk National University. Bohdan is from the city of Denotsk, which is currently occupied by Russian forces.

Bohdan is part of “the next generation of conservation experts,” says Aitken and “is just charging around the country, often taking her three-year-old daughter with her to negotiate with contractors and suppliers to make sure that the building works are happening in the right way.”

“Nataliia is always getting discounts!” says Drapaliuk, referring to how Bohdan has negotiated with firms, including a large steel company, to obtain required materials.

Both Ukrainians manage to maintain wry, jolly demeanors, despite everything happening to their homeland and its natural world.

Drapaliuk almost chuckles when trying to make light of the many challenges caused by the war. “We see them from time to time,” she says with respect to Russian drones. “I live near a power station…and it’s one of the last that the Russians didn’t destroy! It’s less than 1 kilometer away. It’s dangerous and not comfortable. When you live a long time in a stressed system…it becomes part of usual life. It’s a challenge.”

A lot of employees working to protect the parks say that their work is keeping them going and keeping their spirits intact, Drapaliuk and Bohdan relay.

Drapaliuk chose the parks Tellus helps to conserve on the basis that they contained high levels of biodiversity but were receiving less attention. The war resulted in tourist revenues drying up, 18% of forests being either destroyed or mined, and many park rangers left or were conscripted, she confirms. But Drapaliuk is far from nostalgic for the pre-war situation.

“It was bad,” she says. Although there are initiatives to change agricultural practices in Ukraine, as in many countries, it still needs to change to improve biodiversity, believes Drapaliuk.

Moreover, Drapaliuk adds, “since 2010 [there were] not enough people” for protected areas, of which there are 9,000, as well as the national parks. Employees “could not survive [easily] on those salaries,” she says with respect to the salaries of park workers in the two years before the war.

Conservation experts with PhDs were receiving little more than $150 per month, she says. There is a “big list of needs” now and in the future for Ukraine’s nature, Bohdan adds.

Tellus Eye Carbon and Biodiversity Credit Projects

Bragger believes that the sheer weight of those needs and the reconstruction tasks that will confront a post-war Ukrainian government will mean that the private sector will be required to help nature restoration.

“We set up the Nature Fund of Ukraine to ensure that there is a long-term sustainable financial mechanism for Ukraine’s national parks. Why? Because we don’t see the government being able to support these parks for the foreseeable future,” he said in an interview with OPIS. “The sad fact is that national parks are probably quite low down the list of things that are going to be allocated funding. Therefore, it’s on organizations like Tellus and our partners in Ukraine to look at ways of using the private sector.”

Both believe that nature restoration projects that stack carbon and biodiversity credits could be one of the answers to that conundrum.

“Ukraine has already shown that it doesn’t need a lot of money to support its park network. It is inherently a thrifty country,” argues Bragger, who would like to pioneer biodiversity credits in the country: “If companies are looking to enter the nature credit market, then what better market to associate themselves with? Not only will this help a country containing a third of Europe’s biodiversity, ancient forests and the steppe, but also provide a sustainable income for a country that is defending the freedoms and rights of 450 million Europeans.”

“We started with this crisis funding package [because] we wanted to do something in their darkest hour,” says Aitken about the initial focus of their Nature Fund of Ukraine. “But we’ve always thought …market-based instruments…would be a really great thing for Ukraine.

“We are in active talks with the government about developing nature-based carbon projects,” Aitken reveals. “In all our projects there is a very strong biodiversity element. We plan to stack biodiversity credits on to carbon credit projects…There has been a lot of degradation to the land from farming practices but also from the war as well. We’ve got big plans for Ukraine.”

Indeed, the country’s officials want nature-related help from the outside sources whenever the war ends. “We hope that a lot of masters students will go to Ukraine to enrol and do their master’s thesis and PhD students will [come],” Ukrainian environmental negotiator Oleksii Riabchyn told OPIS at COP28 in Dubai last year. “We have plenty of opportunities, and we will need the best brains in the world with the best energy.”

The country is still managing to attract investment partnerships with other countries and environment-related international private sector investment during the war, Svitlana Grinchuk, Ukraine’s minister of environment and natural resources told OPIS during COP29.

“We don’t need to wait until the war is done,” she said. Grinchuk pointed out that the country had completed construction of a wind farm “just 100 km from the frontline” during the war. “We really have a lot of opportunities” for international investment in the energy and environmental sectors, she added.

Catching Attention from Companies, Investors, Institutions

Both co-founders evince a rising confidence in their project management abilities — “we are really now hitting our stride in terms of operational outputs,” says Aitken about their conservation work in Ukraine — at the same time as they are attracting attention from investors.

Based on conversations at COP16 in Cali and the UN climate summit, COP29 in Baku, it is clear that some of the world’s largest companies and financial institutions are impressed by the pair, who both studied at the University of Oxford.

Tellus Conservation was included by the Symbiosis Coalition amongst its first cohort of potential project developers. Symbiosis, which represents Microsoft, Google, Meta and Salesforce, is looking to bolster the voluntary carbon market and drive up standards by buying carbon offset projects that meet its criteria.

The coalition’s starting guide price, multiple sources say, is $50 per credit — far beyond prevailing market prices, such as the OPIS-assessed REDD+ V24 price of $11.625 on November 27 or the average OPIS-assessed V24 Afforestation, Reforestation and Revegetation (ARR) price of $24.885 on the same day.

“We’re very honored,” Aitken told OPIS in an interview in Cali with respect to Symbiosis’s interest in his company, which also aims to reforest the 3,500 sq km Bombo Lumene park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Tellus founders went to New York Climate Week, Cali and Baku, and Baku, becoming more visible in the process.

“We have traditionally eschewed conferences,” Aitken says. “I think we’ve decided that now is the time to get out and show ourselves more…We’ve done a lot of the hard yards to really work out what our offering is and where we fit in…We know that we have a model that we can replicate elsewhere.”

They plan to expand beyond their existing project portfolio of projects, says Aitken, but they are committed to Ukraine.

“Jody has had a long love affair with the country,” he says, referring to how Bragger kept coming back to Ukraine after being a student journalist reporting on the Orange Revolution’s student leaders in 2004. “And I actually realised this summer that I had fallen in love with it.

“You often read in books how someone moves somewhere and thinks ‘I’ve arrived, this is home’. And I’ve never felt that before until now. I’ve begun to learn the language. And I hope that I have engagement with Ukraine for the next 50 years of my life. I absolutely love it.”