Land Smart (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

‘I’ve got people battering down my door, offering money to use my farm as “solar land”, “battery land”, “carbon storage land” and “biodiversity net gain land” but I am genuinely torn because I want to grow food.’ These are the words of a Hertfordshire farmer.

It used to be so simple. Land was there to provide space for us to live and somewhere for our food to live too. Whether hunted or gathered, that nutrition needed a dwelling place. However, as time went on, food became less chased and more grown: that way our meals were more reliable. Shelter became permanent as we farmed and increasingly robust as we wandered north into colder climes. Those buildings demanded wood for walls and as fuel to heat the space. We learned how to ‘grow’ clothing, too, with wool, leather and cotton. As our settlements expanded, we used land to link them. And as our wealth grew we needed more land to make stuff, and as our population grew we used yet more land to feed us. We found energy below ground; at first coal, then oil and gas kept us warm, moving and powered. Many more of us lived long and prospered.

All the while, wild land – forests, meadows and wetlands – shrank, gobbled up by the plough, the cow or concrete. The animals that dwelt there vanished and the carbon locked up in the land was released to combine with oxygen and increase carbon dioxide, CO2, in the air. This joined forces with pollution from all those fossil-fuel furnaces, dangerously overheating our atmosphere.

That is where we are now – one in four species are facing extinction and the Earth’s atmosphere is perilously close to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average. Fires, floods and storms are worsening and the world’s fundamental geography is changing as ice shrinks from peaks and the poles. How we use land is pivotal to our success or failure in tackling these existential problems, and smart people are waking up to this.

Our use of land is a lever we can pull either way. Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, sums up the problem: ‘As a finite resource and our most valuable natural asset, we can no longer afford to take land for granted. We must move to a crisis footing to address the challenge and make land the focus.’

A series of thoughtful and influential bodies in the UK have joined the chorus:

• In January 2023 the Green Alliance (an influential UK-based environmental think tank) published ‘Shaping UK land use: priorities for food, nature and climate’. They argued that ‘Land use must change to restore nature and achieve net zero globally. Instead of being a source of emissions, it must remove carbon from the atmosphere, while also making space for nature and food production’.

• In February 2023 the Royal Society (the UK’s pre-eminent scientific academy) published a report called ‘Multifunctional Landscapes: Informing a long-term vision for managing the UK’s land’. It states: ‘Now is a critical moment for land use policy globally, but especially in the UK. A confluence of environmental and geopolitical drivers necessitates a strategic rethink of the way decisions are made about how landscapes are managed’.

• In July 2023 the House of Lords published a report entitled ‘Making the most out of England’s land’, arguing for a land use commission and a land use framework to help make the ‘best decisions for land’.

• In November 2023 the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the UK’s pre-eminent global policy think tank) published ‘The emerging global crisis of land use’, warning of a ‘land crunch’ as ‘Competition for productive and ecologically valuable land, and for the resources and services it provides, is set to intensify over the coming decades, as growing demand for land for farming, climate change mitigation and other essential uses deepens.’

• The UK government’s own, long delayed, land use framework is still awaited at the time of writing.

We need land to do many things for us now:

• to absorb CO2 with trees, new marshes and managed pasture

• to grow more food for a growing population

• to provide clean energy with biofuels, solar panels and wind turbines

• to grow trees for building materials and natural fibres

• for recreation and beauty to nurture our physical and mental health

• to give space for the creatures that share our planet.

Where is all this land to come from? After all, we don’t have another Earth to colonise and, with the exception for a few new holiday islands off the Gulf states, we’re not creating new ground from the sea. The sad truth is that we are still stealing it from nature: since the year 2000, an area one quarter the size of Australia has been taken, the vast majority for farming and some for building.

In 2019, the first report from an international organisation called IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) was published, which marshalled research and put forward arguments to make policy makers care as much about the nature crisis as the climate crisis. Among a sackful of alarming statistics, they found that 75 per cent of the world’s land surface had been significantly altered by human activity, 85 per cent of wetland area has been lost and around one million different species face extinction. The overwhelming driver of this loss has been the growth in farmland, and the chair of IPBES, Sir Bob Watson, told me in an interview: ‘We must not extensify and cut down more pristine forest or [destroy] grassland or wetland’. But we still do.

In the richer world of Europe and North America, much of the wild land was cultivated decades, if not centuries, ago. The way to fill more bellies of a booming population was to grow more food off the same area of land – a process known as intensification. This green revolution went global and, in avoiding hunger terms, was a great success as the world population grew yet famine diminished. Research from Our World in Data shows deaths from famine in the fifty years from 1920 to 1970 were nearly ten times higher than in the following fifty years: 70 million shrinking to 8 million. Since the global population was growing so steeply, as a proportion the drop was even higher. This was amazingly good news for humanity, but our natural environment paid a punishing price. The pursuit of productivity pushed farming to grow less variety, while using more fertiliser and the pesti-herbi-fungi-cide cocktail. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring warned of chemicals muting nature’s song, with farmland becoming solely used for stock or crops and a no-go zone for anything else. It proved an accurate prophecy across much of agriculture.

But then we discovered that farming’s environmental footprint is even bigger. It is a giant hose of greenhouse gases: CO2 from cleared forest, degrading soils and manufacturing chemical fertiliser, nitrous oxide from the fertilised fields themselves and methane from rice paddies, sheep and cows. Around one quarter of human-made climate change results from farming and land use change.

Faced by the fact that farming is a major driver of both nature and climate crises, the overwhelming reaction from environmental groups has been to pressurise agriculture itself to be more wildlife- and climate-friendly. In the UK alone we have the Nature Friendly Farming Network, LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming), Organic Farmers and Growers, the Soil Association, the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group and many conservation groups besides. The UK’s Climate Change Committee has estimated that just over 20 per cent of agricultural land must either be rewilded or converted to bioenergy or other non-agricultural crops in order to achieve net zero by 2050. All this pressure is bearing fruit: new English and Welsh government subsidies will pay farmers for the promotion of nature or other ‘public goods’ and not the production of food, while some landowners are opting for complete rewilding of their estates. The European Union-wide ‘Common Agricultural policy’ is more production focused than UK strategy but the direction of travel, both in shifting funds and strengthening rhetoric, is towards nature- and climate-friendly farming.

The business world is pushing land use in a greener direction too. Companies can now offset their greenhouse gas emissions from their transport or energy used on the production line. They are paying for the ‘right’ to continue polluting and make net-zero claims, by having that pollution absorbed elsewhere. These so-called ‘carbon credits’ often pay landowners to boost the carbon uptake of their plot by increasing soil organic matter or planting trees. There is a similar market evolving for nature with biodiversity credits. From the start of 2024 developers in England will be obliged to show that their new building project will lead to an increase in natural abundance of at least 10 per cent. This is called ‘Biodiversity Net Gain’ (BNG). But it doesn’t have to be on the same site; damage can be offset by gains elsewhere and these BNG credits can be traded.

Campaigners, government and...