Senior consultant Laura Stone shares her insights on the complex interplay between land management and decarbonisation, and how Eunomia is using its expertise to help landowners identify bespoke interventions that balance national and local net zero goals.
The UK’s legally-binding net zero target states that, by 2050, the country must be removing the same amount of planet-warming greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the atmosphere as it emits. Currently, agriculture contributes 12% of UK GHG emissions, with further contributions from non-agricultural land (peatlands, wetlands, and saltmarshes). The UK’s forests sequester the equivalent of 4% of emissions. Reaching net zero will require changing how we manage land, so that fewer GHG emissions are released through farming and more carbon is captured (sequestered) using the remaining land.
The UK’s land is also facing the triple challenge of reaching net zero, protecting biodiversity, and improving food security. The UK’s Environment Plan sets targets for achieving clean air and water, ensuring thriving plants and wildlife, reducing flooding, and enhancing natural beauty. Tackling all these goals relies on appropriate land management. Given the UK’s patchwork of landownership, coupled with a lack of clear guidance from government, this is a complex prospect.
National savings
The UK government is exploring how land management can contribute to achieving net zero, biodiversity, and food security, supported by research and advice from universities, charities, and policy and strategy experts (including Eunomia). In addressing this challenge, national policy makers tend to take a ‘utopian’ approach, as if all land could be allocated to different uses in a way that safeguards food security while reducing GHG emissions and enhancing biodiversity.
In this ideal scenario, the most productive land is used to produce food efficiently, maximising yields on the smallest possible area in ways that reduce GHG emissions. Using the best land for food production lessens the need for carbon-intensive agricultural practices. This frees up unproductive agricultural land for planting trees, restoring peatland, and creating other habitats that sequester carbon and support other environmental outcomes.
Own goals?
In reality, of course, land in the UK is not owned and managed centrally. UK landowners comprise individuals and private organisations as well as hundreds of national, regional, and local government entities, with holdings varying in size from a handful to hundreds of thousands of hectares. Each has their own priorities, including financial and social objectives, and many will have set their own net zero targets.
Many landowners are investing significant effort and resources into reducing their GHG emissions; they are also exploring how to use their land to sequester carbon and offset emissions that are too expensive or difficult to reduce. These efforts can have tangible benefits – for example, reducing climate impacts, improving water and air quality, creating jobs and spaces for recreation, and reducing running costs.
However, the results can sometimes undermine national targets. For example, a landowner with highly productive agricultural land could use it for tree planting to sequester carbon, but in doing so could displace food production to less productive areas of the UK that require carbon-intensive inputs. The landowner may meet their own net zero target but increase the country’s overall emissions. (Food production may also be displaced overseas, increasing reliance on imported food.)
In other scenarios, a landowner with unproductive agricultural land could use it for tree planting, thereby reducing their own GHG emissions, sequestering carbon, and supporting the national effort to meet net zero. A landowner with highly productive agricultural land who continues to produce food could support the national net zero effort, but potentially at the expense of meeting their own net zero target.
In practice, this means that local, as well as sectoral, context also needs taking into account. For example, much of the land that Cambridgeshire County Council owns is peatland, which, once drained for farming, is a significant GHG emitter. However, Cambridgeshire’s peat soils are some of the most productive in the UK, and restoring this peatland could displace agricultural activity to land requiring more carbon-intensive inputs.
Making ground
Supporting landowners to decarbonise requires an individual approach that involves quantifying GHG emissions and then developing a tailored list of interventions to reduce these and sequester carbon. Eunomia has worked with local authorities such as Cambridgeshire County Council, large private landowners like the Englefield Estate, individual businesses in the agricultural sector (for example, Dale Farm), and sector-wide organisations such as UK Water Industry Research to analyse GHG emissions and develop decarbonisation recommendations that are tailored to each organisation’s specific challenges.
Eunomia is uniquely positioned to support landowners in two ways.
First, we combine expertise from our low carbon economy team to tackle GHG emissions with expertise from our natural economy team to maximise other potential benefits from land use such as enhancing water quality, facilitating nutrient cycling, or creating recreational spaces. We weigh up competing land uses to explore what can realistically be achieved for net zero, food security, biodiversity, and other national targets, understanding the implications for land use and farmers, as we did for WWF Cymru. In our study for the Environment Agency, we advised on ways landowners can realise financial benefits by coming together to change land management at scale, tapping into emerging nature markets.
Second, we combine our detailed understanding of individual landowners with our contributions to national-level thinking in the UK on optimising land use. We’re currently developing two sets of national land use pathways for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero and through the Land Use for Net Zero consortium – one is top-down (what is physically and technologically possible) and one is bottom-up (what landowners perceive as possible). We feed our knowledge of how national-level thinking is developing back into our advice to landowners and vice versa, to enable a joined-up approach.
There is a clear need for guidance from the UK government on how landowners should manage land in ways that contribute to national net zero goals. In the absence of this, Eunomia’s low carbon economy team uses its in-depth knowledge of land use policy developments and expertise in decarbonisation strategies to navigate complex decisions that deliver positive environmental outcomes, while preparing for future land use policy.
If you want to develop a decarbonisation strategy that balances your land management goals with net zero targets, please contact laura.stone@eunomia.co.uk.
