Jeremy's Blog 24th March 2023: Climate Change, Agriculture and Land Use Decisions

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 23rd March 2023

Next week may give a glimpse of the scale of change ahead and what it might mean for rural land management if carbon imperatives begin to catch up with scheme design while we get closer to deadlines for targets.

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has just produced a synthesis report, summarising its work with the views that:

• it may now be harder to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees without earlier radical change
• the further climate change runs with its hazards, the harder it may be to adapt to it.

With UK’s net zero target for 2050, the UN Secretary General asks developed countries to aim for 2040, a demand for radical change.

Next week, the Government is expected to produce its next net zero plan for decarbonising Britain, answering its judicial review defeat on the adequacy of the present plan as well as the Skidmore Mission Zero report on the business approach to achieving net zero.

The Green Alliance has assessed the gap between current policies and ambitions for the 2028 to 2032 carbon budget. Overall, only 28 per cent of ambition is met by confirmed policies; 9 per cent for agriculture: yet that is within 5 to 9 years. The Green Finance Institute identified a £20bn funding gap for 2030.

Such UK reports stress the importance of DEFRA’s Land Use Framework, proposed in last year’s Food Strategy White Paper. Its argument would be that different areas of land have different suitabilities, whether for farming (itself likely to have major changes), nature, renewables and other uses as well as the more usual development, infrastructure and leisure uses.

Recognition of the best and most versatile land was again considered in England’s NPPF consultation. Not all agricultural land is equally productive. Two thirds of our production is said to come from 40 per cent of our land; the Dimbleby Food Strategy Report said that 20 per cent of our land produces 3 per cent of our calories. Not all agricultural production is of food. Wind and solar are much more efficient users of land for energy than are biomass and biofuel. The market in land guides forestry planting more to parts of Scotland and Wales than England and Northern Ireland. As always, changing economics and social objectives will tend to a change the balance between uses.

These issues may naturally interact with the occupation and even ownership of land. Farmers are rarely developers and not often foresters. Extensive habitat creation may not attract commercial farmers and so either not happen or tend to happen in different hands.

Some of the tensions here were tackled by the 1947 combination of the Agriculture and Town and Country Planning Acts with socially approved development trumping the default status of agriculture, giving power to a Case B notice and overriding the then new statutory security of tenure founded on economic grounds. Public policy and business practicality together touch on choices about the best use of land, influencing who might be the best user.

As we feel our way through these balances, with new policies and markets unfolding, the challenge for farming remains that of renewing productivity improvement, asserting its economic place in this competition from which it has never been exempt.