We joined industry representatives, researchers, and other stakeholders at the Land Use for Net Zero (LUNZ) Big Tent event in September to discuss opportunities and challenges around changes in UK land management.
In 2023, the LUNZ Hub convened a transdisciplinary community to support the UK’s four nations in creating a balanced strategy to achieve net zero. The three-year programme, now at its midpoint, involves research projects specifically looking at the UK’s capacity and capability for transforming land use, soil health, and agriculture as well as focusing on fostering collaboration between the four nations.
Our expert Star Molteno co-leads the Hub’s Net Zero Futures Platform and attended the event alongside other land use specialists on our natural economy team. Discussions at the event continued momentum from an intensive set of workshops that we led at the start of 2025, from which we developed a set of balanced pathways for how agricultural land use could change to 2050. Alongside the LUNZ Hub team, we have been drafting these pathways into narratives to share with stakeholders and have now moved onto modeling them.
Star identified some standout topics at the event including:
- The importance of sharing reflections on what is thought to be a realistic pace of change in the agricultural and land use sector
- The pace of tree planting and how we are far from achieving targets in the UK
- How to increase trees on farmland, and some of the barriers that farmers feel to using trees within their farm enterprise.
- What the UK’s other three nations can learn from the way Welsh farmers are supported by initiatives like Farming Connect, and how support in individual nations compares to strategies set at a UK level by DEFRA.
Star commented on the event saying: “Our work with the LUNZ Hub has revealed that there is a mismatch between what people on the ground are doing, thinking, and feeling and how policymakers approach decisions. The Hub is critical to addressing this translation problem, ensuring stakeholders’ needs are presented to policymakers in a clear way. By coming together as a collective, we can join up the dots more effectively, sharing insights from different standpoints around pace of change and barriers to change.”