Jeremy's Blog - Special Edition: Adapting Rural Land Use for Climate Change
Last week’s CAAV E-Briefing leader ended by pointing to the opportunities for members to apply skills in advising clients on adapting to the climate change that is here and to come:
“It seems sensible for property-based, resource and weather-dependent small businesses with longer term outlooks, like farms and estates, also to look ahead, especially when undertaking new projects or reviewing strategy. As trusted advisers, both bringing a wider view and knowing the property and business, members should be well placed to assist that.”
This supplementary Blog offers an initial view of some of the issues in tackling that.
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A key call on professional advice in the coming years will be farmers and landowners facing and adapting to a widening range of extreme weathers and so to greater and more diverse risks. Building in resilience lies at the heart of this, not only the ability to “bounce back better” from crises but to anticipate risk, whether from climate change or other cause.
While the political mood, on the continent and now here after last week’s by-elections, may be nervous of requiring change of citizens, those with businesses to run and land to manage simply have to cope with what comes. The less successful we are at reducing emissions and sequestering carbon, the more we will have to manage change. Some tools will help both tasks.
Flooding still looks to be the UK’s largest overall risk, bringing risk to affected properties, urban and rural, from intense rainfall running off swiftly, notably in steep valleys like Boscastle, large high rainfall catchments like the Eden or where affected watercourses converge as on the lower Thames or the Humber. The Fens, also challenged by the sea, and other areas rely on sophisticated management for protection. While there is wider discussion of changes in land and water management as well as flood protection works, measures at the individual level will include minimising and avoiding risk while making exposed properties and businesses more resilient to flooding. As floods reach new levels and become more frequent, so this may influence choices on cropping and land use and the location of development.
However, with 70 per cent of the UK farmed and 13 per cent under woods, large areas face more general risks, including sustained and intense periods of heat, drought and storm as well as new pests and diseases. We can gain from the experience of countries used to such stresses.
Measures to protect soils and nutrients from run-off and to improve the status of both arable and pasture soils would strengthen resilience for both drought and wet. The accompanying soil biome may assist plants against disease and stress when regulation and development costs look to reduce available crop protection products. Multi-species pastures have been seen to withstand drought more effectively and agro-forestry may have a role. Another response may be to move some production under cover where the environment can be controlled but demanding investment, energy and water.
Hot dry periods pose a more novel challenge in a temperate country, allied to issues of water shortage, especially in the south and east of Britain. More farms will need more reservoirs, collecting, keeping and using water more efficiently, not just for one year but over years, minimising evaporation and other losses. How might we store and use water from roofs and waste water?
The choices as to which land to hold, buy and rent, cropping, managing livestock, designing buildings and improving air circulation, summer working hours, adapting to flood plains, protecting farm infrastructure and so on will be in this developing context, facing sodden winters as well as baking summers. Insurers making increasing payments for losses from heat, storm and flood, may promote risk management as well as increase premiums and reduce cover – the UK’s transitional Flood Re scheme is to end in 2039.
Already seeing moorland wildfires, trees may be more threatened by drought stress, weakening them for disease and storm, requiring a response in management approach, woodland design and tree selection while landscapes may adapt to reduce fire risk. There may be interesting tensions between biodiversity and reducing fuel load.
The theme of ensuring supply may apply to energy as more farm equipment and automation relies on electricity. With rural property more exposed to weaknesses in the grid when national electricity use will rise, it may often be prudent to provide for self-supply of renewable energy with storage, whether by battery or other means, ready for the scale of future need.
Evolving Government policies and schemes may give some tools to handle this where they fit what needs to be done, perhaps ahead of further regulation while supply chains will bring their own pressures, whether for their needs or for their investors and lenders.
What we cannot know is what will happen in wider world markets as climate change bites more seriously elsewhere. We have seen price volatility for traded commodities exaggerated by export bans and political dislocation – which, like the Arab Spring, may also follow price shocks. Major food retailers are taking more account of climate change resilience as well as carbon in supply chains. The chief executive of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund has foreseen continuing food price inflation but that such pressures also bear on input costs and risk.
We have to react, with advice and decisions, in real time in a sector where most enterprises have an annual cycle limiting the speed of learning and reaction. More volatile and extreme conditions pose fresh questions requiring a practical adaptability in thinking to find answers, seeking out fresh angles and techniques, albeit informed by the aim of stewardship over the years. The external and wider view and rounded advice of the agricultural valuer as a trusted adviser can help many manage what we now face.