Real estate case study: Lauriston Farm

Sustainability. We mean it.

Insight

9 June 2025 |

Alternatives

In this video, we look at the Real Estate team’s involvement in Lauriston Farm, Edinburgh (in partnership with BTPS). The urban farming scheme offers a local, nature-based response to the combined challenges of climate change, biodiversity collapse and the lack of access for all to healthy, fresh and affordable food. By helping to remove carbon from the atmosphere, providing restored ecosystems for a range of wildlife, and engaging the diverse local community in a number of land-based initiatives, the farm is providing multiple benefits to people, nature and the wider environment whilst creating a blueprint for sustainable impact investment.

Fast reading

Biodiversity: The farm has a mission to increase biodiversity – taking it from a simplified and depleted landscape to a vibrant, resilient part of the local ecosystem, using agroecology. One third of Lauriston Farm land is designed for wildlife habitat.

Food production: The farm’s mission is to grow fresh, nutritious food for our neighbourhood, using agroecology.

Community: The farm aims to reconnect this farm with its community. As an agroecological farm, the work includes providing opportunities for people to learn food growing and land-work skills, building social connections around food, and collaborating to address access and equity issues and bring back a local food system.