When I decided to write this blog in early March, the world seemed a very different place. We had a new government settling in, the Agriculture and Environment Bills were due to sail through parliament and a new dawn was breaking on the future of farming and the natural environment. Then suddenly nature bit back – and bit back hard, reminding us of just how inextricably linked the health of the natural environment is to the health of the human race. The short-term economic impacts of COVID-19 will, as we know, be huge, but how will governments respond to the clarion call to work with nature, rather than against it, in the longer term?
As it happens, the originally chosen subject for this blog – the Environmental Land Management scheme – is in fact now an even more important part of the solution for us here in England – and indeed as a model for many countries around the world. The principle of public money for public goods is spot on. We absolutely should be rewarding land managers for managing their land in a way that benefits the natural environment and thus society as a whole, and we should be expecting our food production system to be properly valued by the marketplace and not needing to be propped up by additional public contribution.
However, given that the public consultation for the scheme has been paused temporarily until the virus crisis is over, we now need to ensure that we do not get drawn into a knee-jerk reaction around concerns over food security. It is clear from this crisis that it is not food production that needs fixing, rather that it is food distribution, and as we known for many years, food wastage. We may be wasting less food overall while the crisis prevails, but the normal time “developed world” wastage levels of around 40% of food produced, are simply unsustainable and unacceptable. So yes, the planned National Food Strategy will be more important than ever, but no, it absolutely must not compromise the principles of the ELM scheme. If we can embed such a scheme effectively, with core principles intact, then not only can we sustain a healthier environment, but we can also learn to treat food supply with much greater respect, and thus become far more efficient with the food we do produce.
So what of the scheme detail itself? Well as it stands, Tier 1 of the scheme does include several generic examples of farming activities - for example nutrient management, pest management and livestock management - which could easily be interpreted as “business as usual”. So it is essential that these activities are very clearly defined and very obviously targeted at genuinely environmentally beneficial activities and are not just rewarding farmers for avoiding bad practices.
Tier 2 focuses on the right kinds of activity, such as habitat creation and restoration, natural flood management interventions, species introductions and management etc, but needs a greater emphasis on connecting up both activities and landholdings to create a mosaic of areas where a range of productive enterprises of high nature value are encouraged. For example, low-impact mixed forestry, harvesting of natural products, and extensive meat production.
But it is Tier 3 which aims “to deliver land use change projects at a landscape scale to deliver environmental outcomes”, which has the greatest potential to provide significant “public goods” and thus help mitigate climate change and reverse biodiversity loss. However, it is missing one fundamental activity in the list of examples given, namely the key activity of “rewilding”. As it stands, Tier 3 would incentivise individual activities such as large scale tree planting, peat bog restoration or large scale wetland creation etc. But it would be much more effective to explicitly incentivise rewilding, taking a systems approach to the way land use is managed – or not. This involves supporting multiple interventions in the same large area over the same timeframe to kick-start the restoration of natural processes. There is not enough space here to describe the many reasons why this makes sense, not least those related to efficiency, but I know from my discussions with farmers and landowners all over the country, that the inclusion of the specific mention of rewilding in Tier 3, backed up by a clear definition and principles, will inspire a major new wave of landowner action to deliver multiple benefits at scale for the greater good of society as a whole. In doing so, we will provide a more resilient and diversified future for rural communities throughout the country and become a world leader in tackling the global climate emergency and biodiversity crisis through land and water management.
Professor Alastair Driver FCIEEM is the Director of Rewilding Britain, an organisation founded in 2015 that aims to promote the rewilding of Great Britain. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.