17: Permission to land 2: land use and net zero
From land *ownership* in our last episode to land *use* this time. How can land be used to mitigate climate change? What are some innovative uses of land, and what major barriers still remain? Guests this week: Guy Shrubsole, environmental and rewilding campaigner and author of 'Who Owns England?', and Dr Alona Armstrong, Senior Lecturer in Energy and Environmental Sciences at Lancaster University. Meanwhile, Alan McDonnell from Trees for Life shares how how land can be used creatively to better serve both the climate and communities.
Episode Transcript
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.
Rebecca: And I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
Matt: This episode is the second in our two-parter on land. Last time, we talked about land ownership but today, we dive into how land could be used differently to support a net-zero transition.
Rebecca: We’ll dig into the ways that land is being used locally to combat the climate emergency, the barriers we still face in effective net-zero land use and some of the big opportunities for the future.
Matt: We’re joined by some really exciting guests. First, we have Guy Shrubsole, who is an environmental and rewilding campaigner and author of the book Who Owns England?
Guy: We often think, or are led to believe, that rewilding is about getting rid of people out of the landscape and that’s really not the case. It’s about repositioning our relationship with nature. It’s about letting nature do what it wants to do in terms of restoring natural processes but it doesn’t mean that that’s to the exclusion of increasing economic activity.
Rebecca: We’re also joined by Dr Alona Armstrong, a Senior Lecturer in Energy and Environmental Sciences at Lancaster University. Alona’s work looks at how local and renewable energy production can be done in a way that also delivers environmental benefits, like supporting biodiversity.
Alona: We talk about land use but also land-use management, so you can have a solar park that’s managed in one way, maybe it’s grazed. It’s really kind of trying to understand how management impacts affect the outcome and not just the overall land use.
Fraser: Meanwhile, Alan McDonnell from Trees For Life shares how land can be used creatively to better serve both the climate and communities.
Alan: You need a big picture and you need a big answer to the problems we face now because we’ve left it so long. It’s about scale, it’s about nature at scale and thinking about using that for people together and that kind of shared energy I think is our way out of this mess.
[Music flourish]
Matt: We have a dedicated Twitter handle and if you haven’t already done so, go and find us and follow us @LocalZeroPod to get involved with the discussions there. Also, please email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you need more than 280 characters to share your thoughts.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Right, well, I guess we’d better bring back Fraser. Fraser, you’re looking very perky at the moment in your yellow Scotland shirt.
Fraser: [Laughter] I’m perky for now, yeah.
Matt: Radiant.
Fraser: Yeah [laughter]. I’m excited. I’m feeling very, very hopeful for the Scotland game tonight which will have happened by the time this episode comes out. So either I’m ecstatic or a little bit disappointed at how the result went but looking forward to it.
Matt: Let’s hope it’s a good result and, of course, we’ll record two different episodes; one where you’re very perky [laughter] and the other where you’re really quite sad [laughter]. But yeah, good luck to you all. Of course, England plays tonight as well and so we may have to record four episodes where we have [laughter] happy English, happy Scots and vice versa.
Fraser: You’ll know if there are no episodes next week that it went bad for everyone.
Matt: Yes, we will take a bit of a break [laughter]. So what’s been happening with you guys?
Rebecca: I’ve been on holiday since we last recorded. I’ve had a glorious week in the Lake District with my family – absolutely wonderful.
Fraser: Amazing.
Matt: Excellent.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Matt: Anywhere nice?
Rebecca: Everywhere nice. I mean it’s absolutely stunning down there but I have to say, our last episode really got into my head and every time the family and I got out on the lake in our little canoes paddling around, all I could think was, ‘Who owns this lake? Who owns that hill over there? Who determines what boats can come on the lake?’ It was properly in my head [laughter].
Matt: You’ve been bitten by the land bug.
Rebecca: I have.
Matt: I was talking to folk before and they say it always comes back to land. Eventually, all roads lead back to who owns that building or that plot. So yeah, I’m glad. Did you get any further with that, Becky? Did you understand who owned the lake?
Rebecca: Well, no, not all. I also wasn’t really looking it up as I was trying to wrestle four-year-old twins into and out of wetsuits [laughter].
Matt: You’re never off the clock, Becky. I mean it’s actually amazing how much of the Lakes is owned by a single landowner and that’s the National Trust, particularly around Windermere and that area. It’s an interesting question.
Rebecca: We were actually staying further north and staying on a farm. So obviously, I got an insight into who owned that patch of land and they had a small wildlife lake and lots of animals going around. Obviously, that was able to be used in a way that they wanted to in order to support their own goals but, as you say, just a tiny proportion of the whole Lake District.
Matt: That’s it and that’s what today’s discussion is all about. How do we use land differently? So the first episode was very much about who owns the land because, as Malcolm Combe was pointing to, whoever owns the land has the whip hand over how that land is used. So today, we’re talking about how you should use that land.
Fraser: It’s in the headlines so often and we referred to it in the first land episode too. You’d be amazed at how much on your doorstep or around the corner from you, whether that’s contested, or being put to use, or whatever it might, it’s everywhere. It’s not just big chunks of the Lake District. It’s not just the Highlands. It’s that little bit of green.
Rebecca: It’s my own garden actually. This is a constant argument between me and my husband [laughter]. He’s so keen on the lawnmower. I’m actually possibly in trouble now because he’s started listening to Local Zero [laughter]. He wants to always have lovely grass that’s not very high and I just want him to leave it and I want to rewild it.
Matt: He wants Centre Court at Wimbledon. I know the feeling [laughter]. Listen, we’ve got a couple of questions. Last week, I asked you questions about who owns the UK or who owns England, so I was referring to Guy’s book, who we’ve got as a guest later. These questions are more about how we use the UK. So if I were to ask you how much of the UK’s land is given over to farming and agriculture, what would you say?
Fraser: As a percentage?
Matt: As a share, yeah.
Rebecca: 30%
Matt: Fraser?
Fraser: I’ll go a little bit lower – 25%.
Matt: Way off both of you. It’s 70%.
Rebecca: Wow!
Fraser: Wow! That’s terrible actually.
Rebecca: Oh my goodness!
Matt: Yeah, it’s a huge amount and if I then asked you how much of the UK was given over to forestry, what would you say? There’s only 30% left to play with, right? [Laughter]
Fraser: Okay, then it’s got to be small, like 3-4% maybe?
Matt: Becky?
Rebecca: I was going for 10%. Now I feel like I’m way off. Go on, Matt.
Matt: Higher. It’s 13%.
Fraser: Wow!
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: Actually, if you were to answer that question, Becky, in 1980, you’d have been about right. It was 9% in 1980 and we’re slowly climbing up.
Rebecca: That’s what I was thinking of clearly.
Matt: Of course, yes.
Rebecca: You know, you didn’t specify your timeframe [laughter].
Matt: I should have said 2021. My fault. Absolutely on me that. So land is slowly changing but in the Committee on Climate Change’s Sixth Carbon Budget, land use is a big part of this and they’re really wanting to shave off as much in terms of carbon emissions as possible. How do you think they can do that? What are the big ticket items do you reckon?
Rebecca: Well, I’m guessing we probably want larger amounts of land for forestry. We know the benefits that trees can bring. Fraser, let’s not be planting any of your fake grass from last time [laughter].
Matt: Fake plastic trees [laughter] - #radiohead.
Rebecca: I think the trees will do the job [laughter]. I haven’t actually looked at the types of agriculture that we have but you’ve got to realise that cattle have significant emissions associated with them. I mean actually, all animal farming has significant emissions and so I’m assuming that the best way to do that would be to change the way in which we use our land.
Matt: Diet is a really interesting one. If you reduce emissions, one of the key ways of doing that is diet change and the Climate Change Committee (CCC) point to, by 2030, a 20% reduction in meat and dairy consumption. Now not only does that withdraw many of these animals that produce emissions and the feedstock that goes in, it can actually free up quite a lot of land in doing so but then the question is what you could do with that land. Could you do something more exciting and more beneficial for the environment? The other factor you can look at is the restoration of the peatlands which is a huge one. There are opportunities to grow energy crops. Really, the question is if you were to reduce the amount of land given over to agriculture, what else could you do? Because agriculture is 70%, right, so that’s the biggest thing to reduce.
Rebecca: I think this raises a really interesting question because obviously, agriculture brings in income to those people that own that land in a way that I’m assuming forestry doesn’t.
Matt: I think that’s a really difficult question to answer and I think, hopefully, our guests can offer a bit of insight on that. I guess the point is about making all land productive and financially viable and a big part of that, and Rewilding Britain makes this point, is that you’ve got to attach a value to that land. You can’t just simply say that land, because it’s grasslands or forests, doesn’t have an inherent value around biodiversity and carbon. But the other thing to say is, and we often talk about climate change purely from a mitigation perspective, how we manage the land and how we use the land is really important in terms of climate change adaptation as well. So flood risk is a huge one and there have been some really exciting studies from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) where they’ve done pilot schemes about how you can green the uplands and forests and restore the peatlands and how that reduces the flood risk down the valley.
Rebecca: I’m reminded of that video that I think went viral on YouTube some years ago around the trophic cascades in Yellowstone Park and the small change of introducing wolves but effectively changing the nature of the grazing animals there and changing the sorts of plants that were there had fundamental changes on the kind of wider landscape and ecosystem. I think what you’re saying is that we’re not talking about introducing wolves here but by shifting the sorts of ways in which we’re using the land has a much further-reaching impact than we might necessarily think of initially.
Fraser: It’s not always just environmental, right? It’s not always just the ecosystem either. There are ways that land is being used now, like when we talked about the financial and economic side of it, which brings a whole lot more benefit to people and communities as well. There are multiple reasons for changing the way we do it and the way that we use land and multiple benefits to be had if we’re doing it in the right ways and the considered ways.
Matt: Before we bring our guests in, I just wanted to give a little example of that, Fraser. I’m often reminded of Whitelee Wind Farm just south of Glasgow. They’re one of the biggest in Europe, if not the biggest. Ostensibly, that was set up as a wind farm to generate power for Glasgow and its environs. Actually, if you go there, it’s not what the people use it for. I mean, yes, they’ll consume the power but they’re there to walk their dogs and ride their bikes. You’ve got horses there [laughter]. You’ve got everything. It’s a day out. It’s people taking exercise and really enjoying the benefits of that. So absolutely, yeah, it’s the wider benefits.
Rebecca: It’s really fascinating and I just want to touch back on a point that you raised, Matt, which was around diet and the interplay between how we use our land, what we’re using it for and if we’re using it for agriculture and the fact that there’s this kind of relationship then with what we’re eating and what we’re doing. To what extent do we think that this has to be something that’s international? Right now, a lot of the cheeses, for example, that we see in our supermarkets come from the UK. I’m always seeing cheeses from the UK. Okay, we see some from overseas as well but there’s a lot of UK-based produce in UK supermarkets. If we weren’t using that land in the same way and producing the same sort of produce, we could see a rise in imports of these things if people aren’t changing their diet. It’s probably not one for today because it’s such a hard topic but perhaps something we’ll have to come back to in future episodes is looking at this interplay and the willingness of people to change their diet and adopt these recommendations from the CCC.
Matt: Unexpected consequences, absolutely, to be avoided but I think there’s a useful tidbit from the CCC’s report which points to the key link between what we do locally in our own homes and neighbourhoods versus how the land is used elsewhere. If we were to raise our ambition in terms of moving away from meat, so instead of the 20% reduction I mentioned before... if we’re pointing directly at a 28% reduction by 2035... what’s that? Almost a third less meat by 2035 would free up a fifth more land for agricultural production. A fifth of 70% is a huge swathe of the UK; a couple of counties worth, if not more. The question is, and it’s an exciting one, what do we do with that land? How do we use it and this, Becky, transfers not just nationally but internationally and how do we use our land elsewhere?
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Wow! Well, we’d better bring in our guests and get on with this show. There’s so much to cover.
Matt: Absolutely. Bring them in.
Alona: Hello, my name is Alona Armstrong. I work at Lancaster Environment Centre where I research how renewable energy infrastructure and ecosystems interact and I do this with a positive ethos. Land-use change for renewables is changing and how can we do it in the best way possible?
Guy: Hello, my name is Guy Shrubsole. I’m an environmental campaigner and author of the book Who Owns England? which is about land ownership, who owns it and how we use it.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So welcome, Alona and Guy. An absolute pleasure to have you onboard. We’ve been wanting to have you both along for a little while now. Of course, this is the second in a two-parter. The first episode was about land ownership, who owns Britain and what that means for our battle against climate change and other biodiversity issues. But today is very much about land use and what we should do with the land that we own. So a fairly broad question, I think, to begin with, is how important is the way in which we manage our land for climate change? Is this a real critical issue and one that should be very much at the forefront of our minds or is this a secondary issue versus some of the other things we’ve covered on the pod?
Alona: For me, it’s absolutely critical. The carbon is cycling between the land, oceans and the atmosphere and so what happens on the land and how we manage it determines whether it’s a source or a sink for carbon. How we use it determines carbon cycling processes at that place and so what we do with our land is central to tackling climate change.
Guy: I absolutely agree with everything Alona has just said and obviously, how we use land is fundamental also to the other environmental crises we face in terms of the collapse of species and other environmental issues like pollution and eutrophication of rivers and so on. It’s very crucial but also it’s something that I think has often been overlooked. It’s often left till the very end of international negotiations or given complex acronyms like LULUCF (Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry) or it’s left until the very end in terms of policy-making by national government. They sort of put it in the ‘too difficult’ tray and something they’d rather tackle much further down the line.
Rebecca: This is a really interesting point that I think you’re both raising and I completely agree. It feels like net zero can be such a big part of our national conversation and then it’s almost like these other things are kind of bolted onto the side rather than recognising the complete interdependence of these different objectives. I guess I’m just quite interested in how some of these might be competing objectives or whether they’re things that we can address together. Can we manage our land in a way that can address climate change and support our net-zero agenda whilst also supporting these other very important objectives around our wider environmental services and ecosystem services? Alona, I know you’ve done some work in this space, particularly around solar. What have you seen from your research?
Alona: First of all, at a very high level, I really hope we can because otherwise, I think we’re in trouble and fixing the climate crisis and making that ecological crisis worse is simply not an option we have. Both are really urgent and it’s been really good in the last couple of years to see the rise of the ecological emergency as well as the climate crisis. I look at renewable energy and mostly solar parks or land-based photovoltaic energy production. What our work, as a group, is focused on is what ecological implications that land-use change has. What does happen to land and ecological processes, natural capital, ecosystem services and biodiversity if we take an area of land and convert it into a solar park? Within that, we talk about land use but also land-use management, so you can have a solar park that’s managed in one way, maybe it’s grazed, and you can have a solar park that’s not grazed. You can have one that’s managed for biodiversity or they can not be managed for biodiversity. It’s really kind of trying to understand how management impacts affect the outcome and not just the overall land use if that makes sense.
Rebecca: Earlier in our chat, Matt and I were talking about if you’re shifting away from using land from, say, agriculture to using land for other purposes, what could those other purposes be? Do you see the potential to do something on land that can deliver multiple positive outcomes?
Guy: Yes, I think a crucial part of how we use land better in the future is getting to grips with multifunctionality. I think a lot of trends in land use, particularly in the 20th century, were effectively towards monoculture agriculture. Some of those older forms of land use, which could also be used to greater effect in the future, were forgotten. I’m thinking of things here like agroforestry, for example, which is a more recent name for something that’s actually got a very long history in the UK and in other countries and which is the way in which farmers have traditionally combined trees, hedges, copses and woods as part of the farmed environment. I think we’ve seen a big decline in Britain in the use of trees and hedgerows in the farm landscape. So I think, in the future, it’s about getting a more multifunctional landscape back with nature corridors and wildlife corridors through agroforestry, silviculture and all these sorts of things which would obviously help resolve both the climate and ecological emergencies.
Rebecca: So if this is something that we used to do, why are we not doing that anymore? Was there a reason that these changes started to happen and that we started to focus more on these single objectives on our land?
Guy: Well, I think there have obviously been some bigger economic drivers. The trend toward modern plantation forestry was partly driven by the severe timber shortage that Britain faced in the aftermath of World War One. There was a shift toward a reduction of wood solely for timber and pulp and paper. That’s obviously been driven by big trends towards the greater need and greater demand for those sorts of products in Britain. Modern agricultural subsidies incentivise farmers to keep their land free of what the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has called ‘ineligible features,’ in other words, trees and hedgerows.
Matt: Fascinating. Alona, turning sharply towards energy and looking at energy production, just as an example here and I like Guy’s framing there of multifunctionality, is this something that we can build into our energy generation but also maybe the places where we consume energy too?
Alona: Yeah, for sure and I completely agree with Guy that the only way to go forward is for land to be used for multiple uses. That’s often the only way things stack up. That’s probably the only way we can produce everything that we need like food, fuel, fibre, space for reaction and the aesthetic value from the amount of land we have as our population grows and our resource demands per capita. Yeah, I completely agree that we definitely have to do that. I think there is a lot of scope to do that with renewable energy. There’s an immense amount of scope to manage solar parks for multiple uses. In the UK, they’re often producing that much-needed, low-carbon electricity and they’re being grazed, so still contributing to food production in the farming system. Some are managed for biodiversity with the creation of habitats and boosting the state of our ecosystems. I’ve not heard about it in the UK but overseas in Spain and Southern France, there is a concept called agrovoltaics where there are essentially PV arrays with crops grown underneath. That’s because, in those areas, the intensity of the sunlight is often too high and they’ll be doing intercropping or they’ll be cropping under shade cloth. So there are loads of ways and for me, and one of the reasons I focus on PV technology is it’s such a flexible technology and scale of deployment. There’s so much scope to really design systems with the technology and with the energy gains in mind but also with the ecological systems in mind. Don’t just design it to produce the most electricity. Design it thinking about what it’s going to do for crop growth underneath or for biodiversity. I think that’s how you’re going to get the win/wins we really need.
Matt: It feels like what you’re proposing there and what Guy is proposing around this multifunctional land use is a little bit different to the tone that the Climate Change Committee’s Sixth Carbon Budget report presented which was very much about, roughly, 70% of land is used for agriculture. If we can change our diet, we can shrink that amount and do something else with it. If we can make agricultural practice more efficient, we can shrink that again and do something different, often carbon sequestration through reforestation. I find this really interesting regarding this multifunctional land use. You’ve given some great examples there, Alona, around the energy sector. Guy, is there anything there that you can point to maybe outside of the energy sector about how we can use these multifunctional spaces and you can see different sectors kind of colliding within a single hectare?
Guy: Yeah, sure. I think the Committee on Climate Change often does some fantastic work and some brilliant reports. It’s been great to see them do these recent reports on land use but I think I would share that critique of their recent report that it doesn’t really factor in, as much as they could do, these changed patterns of land use in terms of multifunctionality. I think they probably underestimate the potential for agroforestry. They do mention it in there but with some uncertainties about what carbon storage potential it could deliver. One example I think I’ve already given is really around agroforestry and so I don’t want to go on about that much more but I think it is certainly a really interesting area where farmers can combine the grazing of livestock that’s reduced grazing intensity amongst trees such as wood pasture system that used to be much more prevalent in the uplands. I think it is also important to recognise that we do need to potentially repurpose some land that is predominantly agricultural nowadays and do more to restore nature on it. I think there are large parts of very low productivity farmland in Britain where there is a role for a reduction in grazing intensity, not necessarily taking all grazing off that land but perhaps a change in stocking densities, a change in the sorts of livestock being grazed and perhaps a shift from quite so many sheep on some of our upland areas to hardy and native breeds of cattle who are, perhaps, better suited to being able to do the sorts of naturalistic and conversation grazing that we really are after. Even if we’re talking about areas which are rewilding, these are not necessarily areas where there’s no economic activity going in. It just may mean that there’s less extracted economic activity going on.
Rebecca: Clearly, there’s quite a lot of opportunity to make these changes and to look at using land not just differently but incorporating multiple things into the same area of land. This starts to raise a really big question about the people involved and who needs to be involved to create these changes and how. Guy, I’ve heard you talk about policy and incentives and so presumably, there’s a role for policymakers here. Is there a role for engaging, say, farmers in new ways? Is there upskilling that’s needed? Who do we really need to get involved to create these changes?
Guy: Yeah, absolutely. There are all sorts of things that need to happen I think. One of those is through the ongoing post-Brexit shift in the way in which farm payments are made and the rules around them. Another is, I think, through taking inspiration from the fantastic stuff being done by, particularly, the Community Land Movement in Scotland. I think there’s also potentially more to be done around developing land-use strategies or land-use plans and seeing them as either held by a community or held by local government and possibly with a national-level land-use plan or strategy as well. This is something that could better guide spatial planning, not just of the built environment which is obviously the focus of most of the existing planning systems across Britain but actually, something that also has some guidance to give on wider land use around the 80% or so of land that isn’t the built environment but that is in farming or forestry in some way or other.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Okay, Fraser here, taking over things for a while as usual because I’ve been hearing from one project in the Scottish Highlands that is a real role model for how to repurpose land so that it works better for both the environment and communities.
Alan: Hello, I’m Alan McDonnell. I’m Programme Development Manager at Trees For Life, the charity dedicated to rewilding the Scottish Highlands. For us, that’s about allowing nature to develop through natural processes but also involving people in that so that communities that live here and the people that own this land can work together.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: So how long has Trees For Life been operating? How did it come into being?
Alan: Trees For Life has existed as a formal entity since 1993 but our founder, Alan Watson Featherstone, began work in the late ‘80s and he was basically inspired by visiting Glen Affric and seeing the amazing pinewood there, recognising it was under threat and wanted to do something about it. He created Trees For Life as a charity that would restore that forest by bringing trees back and then you start to link together nutrient cycles again and the soil process starts to work and you get a positive spiral into how nature can develop across a landscape.
Fraser: So it definitely has a clear environmental benefit and a clear benefit for when we’re talking about the things that we need to combat the climate emergency. But you mentioned there as well, Alan, that there’s a people focus or a community focus there. Could you talk a little bit more about that and about how you involve local people and people in general within Trees For Life?
Alan: As I said, Trees For Life has always been quite people-oriented in the way that we have volunteers and it gives people the chance to work with us and contribute to our vision of rewilding. Particularly in the last few years, we’ve become much more outward-focused as well, looking at the communities around where we work and looking at how we can help people and work with communities to align with our objectives more. Specifically, with that, we’re thinking about what kind of nature-based business opportunities and employment opportunities we could start to work towards in the future and how rewilding could play a part in that. One of the most ambitious projects we’re working on at the minute currently is East-West Wild and that is a proposal to have a landscape-scale collaboration between nature interests like ourselves but with communities and with the landowners to see nature as a catalyst for the long-term social and economic regeneration of communities alongside the regeneration of the landscape. All the emphasis and priority is now being put on the climate emergency, on carbon sequestration through land-use change and primarily through peatland restoration and through woodland creation to block up some of the key emission sources of carbon dioxide from our landscape, from peatlands, and to restart the storage processes there. From a woodland and forest point of view, it’s to get sequestration going and so drawing carbon down into the soil and into timber. There is a lot still to understand about that but it’s a huge opportunity because that’s recognised as our pathway at national level and UK level to get to net zero so that we can go carbon negative with parts of our landscape through land-use change.
Fraser: So huge, huge plans for the future. It sounds like a lot of ambition is still there. It’s a massive project but there’s a lot still to do. What do you see as the key opportunities and the key barriers to expanding what you do going forward?
Alan: So much of this is about people and the relationships between people across this landscape and it’s easy to get drawn into discussions of why people disagree about what the future should be. One of the things I think we’re putting much more emphasis on is that there is so much that people have in common about what they want for that future. Everybody values nature. People see the closeness of the relationship and the connection between people and nature and people and the landscape which is something that stretches back through time; not just centuries but forever. What should that look like in the future if we’re looking ahead 30 years or looking ahead further down the track? What kind of steps should we be taking now to build a vision of the future we can share? The more conversations we have like that and the more ideas come forward, the more energy comes into the situation. This project, in particular, is about trying to create that positive upward spiral of energy and resource.
[Music flourish]
It’s about that restoration of nature at scale, whether you want to call that rewilding or call it something else. Seeing that as an opportunity and an imperative, whether that’s for the climate emergency or the crisis in nature and biodiversity, is something we all value and something to respond to at scale. There’s a bit of an in-house mantra that Trees For Life has developed which is ‘go big or go home.’ We need a big picture. We need a big answer to the problems we face now because we’ve left it for so long. It’s about scale. It’s about nature at scale and about thinking about using that for people together and that kind of shared energy I think is our way out of this mess.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Thanks so much to Alan from Trees For Life in the Scottish Highlands. Back now to Becky and Matt’s chat with Guy and Alona. Matt is getting into how we can better use land to mitigate against rising temperatures due to climate change.
[Music flourish]
Matt: I was reading into land use and I think the pod is probably guilty of this... we talk almost exclusively about climate change mitigation. We probably don’t pay enough attention to climate change adaptation and if the various models and scenarios are to be believed, which we should, we’re looking at least a couple of degrees of warming anthropogenically regardless of whether we meet our climate change targets or not. It could be a lot worse. So should we be thinking about land-use management as a triple-headed beast and one where we’re not just mitigating climate change and not just enhancing biodiversity but also trying to manage our land in a way which is more resilient to climate change?
Guy: Yeah, absolutely and it’s something I started looking at when we got some of the particularly bad floods that struck Britain back in 2013 and 2014. That was a real eye-opener, I think, for me and perhaps for obviously the wider policy world, hopefully, climate change is a very real and present danger to Britain in terms of its impacts on people, society, infrastructure and so on. Adaptation needs to be hardwired into the way in which we use our land as well. As, again, another Committee on Climate Change report recently noted, there’s very little work being done by the UK government at least to advance that. It’s been put on the back burner because – ‘Oh, we’re committed to net zero, so we’re doing all that we need to about climate change.’ Well, as you say, unfortunately, that’s not the case. We’ve got a few degrees, potentially, already in the pipeline of warming at least and clearly, we’re already seeing 10 above preindustrial levels the impact of that in terms of flood risk and potentially increased storm surges or increased severity of storm surges because sea level rise is ongoing as the water warms up. There’s a real issue, particularly around what is often termed ‘managed realignment’ of bits of the coast but to some, particularly, of course, communities living on the coast in those areas, it would be seen as an abandonment of sea defences. If done in the right way with proper transition measures done for communities most at risk, it could be a really interesting way in which land-use change takes place in the UK in the future. There are lots of areas where nature could be doing much more to provide natural flood defences such as more salt marshes. They can only really develop again if we tackle what is called ‘coastal squeeze’ where, basically, hard flood defences that have been built in previous decades, like concrete flood defences and sea walls, are allowed to be taken away and that land realigned. Obviously, if there are communities that have grown up in those areas since those flood defences were put in place, that needs to be thought about incredibly carefully and those communities are given funds and support to consider their future and take those into their own hands.
Matt: Excellent. Alona, is this anything that your research has covered?
Alona: Not explicitly but at a very basic level, the higher biodiversity of a system, the more resilient it is to environmental change. So if you can improve biodiversity, you’re going to have a system that’s more resilient in the face of climate change.
Rebecca: Matt, I know you talked about the three-headed beast but I’m wondering if there are maybe four, or five, or six heads in here because not all land is the same, quite clearly. Alona, I was absolutely fascinated when you were talking about the different groups that are getting involved, particularly the industry groups. You wouldn’t normally expect to have an interest in some of these areas. I’m guessing there are a number of reasons why they do but clearly, there are a whole lot of different sorts of stakeholders in this and a lot of the land may not be accessible to local communities; whereas, other land is right on your doorstep. There seems to be a lot of potential engagement that communities could have with it and ways in which it could be used, not just to support resilience in the face of climate emergencies but also to potentially support those communities in other ways. What about some of the wider social benefits that it can create? I remember reading some work – Gosh! This is years ago and I’m going to completely forget who wrote it – about the importance of being able to get connected to nature for mental wellbeing. I’m starting to see all of these potential additional benefits if we could just do things in different ways and really support not just the climate agenda or environmental agenda but the wider agenda. So Alona, bringing it back to local, solar farms are often very much part of a local energy ecosystem that can engage communities. Do you see some of these potential benefits coming through or can you see a way in which changing this approach to how we’re using our land can support a fairer, better future in a number of different areas?
Alona: The first solar park I worked at was the first community-owned solar park in the UK. They had a really strong community focus and they ran educational trips for schools. Every summer, they had this marquee up and portable toilets because there were just events all through the summer like school visits, public open days and all sorts of activities going on. There were definitely things happening there. There is another organisation called Power to Change which I spoke with a couple of years ago now. Essentially, they do lots of things but one of the things they were doing was buying solar parks and then selling them to the community to increase community ownership. We went down to meet a community group who were part of managing this solar park down in Devon. They were really keen to get involved in promoting biodiversity on their site and all the kind of good stuff that came out with them.
Rebecca: In fact, we might just have to clarify that. You’ve talked about solar parks but perhaps you could just explain, for people listening that don’t know what a solar park is and who might have all sorts of bizarre imagery going on in their heads right now, what you mean when you say solar park.
Alona: Essentially, they are ground-mounted photovoltaic cells. You’ll see them often by the sides of motorways. There will be long rows and they’ll be at a slant. It’s the same tech that’s on those retro-calculators but bigger and in a field.
Rebecca: [Laughter] I’m sure I’ve seen them countless times when I’ve driven down to Cornwall to visit my family. Guy, are you seeing this in the work that you’re doing? I guess that’s a little bit of a different context but are you seeing the engagement of communities or the opportunity to use land to support these wider social goals as well as environmental outcomes?
Guy: Yeah, definitely. Rewilding Britain, for example, did a recent study looking at 20 or so rewilding projects across England and they found that there has been a 47% increase in job numbers on those estates or those projects as a result.
Rebecca: Wow!
Guy: We often think or are led to believe that rewilding is about pushing people out and getting rid of people out of the landscape and that’s really not the case. It’s about repositioning our relationship with nature. It’s about letting nature do more of what it wants to do in terms of restoring natural processes but it doesn’t mean that that’s to the exclusion of increasing economic activity. There are also loads more volunteering opportunities as a result of these projects. I think there’s also a really interesting and increasing dialogue going on about repeopling alongside rewilding, particularly in Scotland where, of course, there is a horrendous history of the Highland Clearances and then concerns about what might happen if we were to see estates, in the future, that still own big chunks of the Highlands trying to engage in a further period of clearance in the name of, for example, rewilding. I think, actually, a lot of estates are starting to now be very aware of that. The Bunloit Estate in Scotland is starting up this dialogue about repeopling and their plan is also about trying to restore jobs to the area.
Matt: To wrap up, I think we’ve got quite an important question for our listeners and to bring it back to the local level, what is it you believe our listeners can do to improve the way that we use and manage our land? Whether that’s as a household, as a community or whether it’s as somebody who holds an investment somewhere, how should people be changing the decisions that they make on a day-to-day basis?
Alona: For me, I think individuals and communities have done so much over the last couple of years to really raise the profile of climate and ecological emergencies and put it on the agenda, from school strikes, Extinction Rebellion and petitioning councils or institutional business to make either net-zero commitments or to declare climate and ecological emergencies. That’s happened and that’s been as a result of petitioning, protesting, hard work and civil disobedience. It’s all in there but there has been so much progress over the last couple of years that I think people have already done a lot. I think another mechanism to do it is through planning applications. If there is going to be any change in land, then most things have to have a planning application and that’s an opportunity for people to input and they can fall back on this increasingly supportive environmental policy, the need for biodiversity net gain and the desire for an environmental net gain, etcetera, and they can use that in their responses to planning consultations. There’s loads of stuff we can all do as individuals by being aware of the provenance of our food and the implications of what we eat, where we travel and how we travel.
Matt: Excellent. Thank you, Alona, and the final word to you, Guy, then, please.
Guy: Alona has given some really good examples there of things people can do. I’d add just one more which is there was a wonderful piece recently written by Sophie Yeo for the Inkcap Journal which is a great newsletter about nature. She did an investigation into how local authorities were using the land that they owned, including whether local authorities had rewilding plans for how they were using their land. So one thing I would encourage people to do is to contact their councils and ask them about whether they’re planning to rewild their land or how they’re starting to use their grass verges for nature. Are they allowing them to reseed with wildflowers or are they just mowing them to within an inch of their life every few weeks? So getting involved in local land use would be my recommendation.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So Guy and Alona, thank you very much for your time. It was absolutely fascinating. I hope you’re able to make a couple of minutes just to join us for the next part of our show which is Future or Fiction? with our ever-reliable and ever-creative Fraser Stewart.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Thanks very much, Matt. Yes, so for our guests and for the uninitiated, Future or Fiction? is a game that we play every show where I present the panel with a new technological innovation and you have to decide if you think it’s real, i.e. if you think it’s the future, or if you think I’ve pulled it out of my backside, in which case you think it’s fiction. So today’s technology is called... In The Genes. That’s In The Genes. So we all know that buying new clothes can make you feel like a whole new person but how about this? Scientists have designed wearable nano-generation technology that harnesses the kinetic energy created by clothing as the wearer moves. The generators can be woven into clothing items where energy is then created through friction which can then be used to power small devices like smartwatches and mobile phones. I promise that was not a deliberate Freudian slip [laughter] by any stretch there. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish and low steady beat]
Rebecca: So, Fraser...
Fraser: Becky?
Rebecca: ...a question for you. This wouldn’t be Future or Fiction? without a question from me. We’ve got these little devices woven into our clothes which, when we move, are generating electricity and that electricity can be used to power a smartwatch. Do I need to plug my smartwatch into my jumper?
Fraser: There must be some kind of connection there, yeah [laughter]. It has to connect somehow, right?
Matt: I’ve just got this image, Fraser, of a smartphone or smartwatch powering down and me having to get up and do a few laps around my house just to get it working [laughter]. Is this the idea?
Rebecca: Do you remember... I don’t know but I want to say it must have been in the ‘90s when you had your wallet on a big chain attached to your jeans [laughter]. So I’ve got this vision of all these chains coming off your jeans to attach to your devices.
Matt: We’re going to have to hand over to our guests for a little bit of clarity on this. Alona, do we think this is baloney or not?
Alona: Well, I know you can get those kinetic watches, can’t you? So I know that kind of technology exists and I know that we should wash our clothes less because that’s more sustainable because of the chemical use, the energy use and the water use. But electrical stuff that you do have to wash eventually? I’m going to say fiction.
Matt: Yeah, you wouldn’t want to wash that pair of jeans, would you? [Laughter] It would cost a bit. Guy, what do we reckon?
Guy: I’m really torn now because obviously, Alona is definitely the energy expert here [laughter]. I’m sure I’d heard something about some trainers that are repowered by the use of kinetic energy or just by using them but surely a pair of jeans can’t do the same thing [laughter], so probably fiction.
Fraser: Probably fiction, okay. Were those your own light-up trainers, Guy, that you were talking about? [Laughter]
Guy: Definitely not cool enough to own a pair of trainers like that.
Matt: I don’t know. This is a difficult one. I immediately wanted to ask a question. What’s wrong with a battery and what’s wrong with a power socket? I don’t know. Fraser, I’ve asked these questions before and it turned out they were silly questions.
Fraser: I implore everyone to remember every episode is that one, I am not a technical person. I don’t know but sometimes I make stuff up that sounds good. The second thing is that not everything is going to be answered in this case. Some of the technologies we’ve had in the past have been very early stage and some of them have been completely made up.
Matt: But I also think you’re starting to blur the line for me between fact and fiction because sometimes I hear these and I don’t know whether I’ve dreamt them or whether you’ve said them in a previous episode [laughter] and I just don’t know what’s true anymore. Listen, we’re going to have some scores on the doors, so Becky, what are you going for?
Rebecca: Yeah, so I think I’m going to have to push for fiction. I didn’t even think about washing the clothes. I promise I do wash my own clothes but that hadn’t entered my mind and I feel like that’s a very strong argument [laughter]. While I definitely know that you can create those technologies to turn that movement into electricity, as we’ve seen in some of the technologies we’ve already had on the show, I just don’t see it happening in our clothes because I can’t see how you would get that energy to your devices or, as the very good point that you raised, Alona, about what that would mean for the longevity of your clothes. So I am 100% fiction on this one.
[Music flourish and low, steady beat]
Matt: Alona, fiction were you?
Alona: I was fiction.
Matt: Guy, I think you were fiction too, were you?
Guy: Yeah, me too. Me too.
Matt: Okay, well, listen, just for the hell of it, I’m going future, okay? So that’s three on one. I don’t like those odds [laughter].
Fraser: So, Matt, you’re going to be bold and you’re going to stick with future?
Matt: I’m going bold, yeah. Again, it sounds like one of these ridiculous Silicone Valley get-rich-quick schemes.
Fraser: Yeah, is this one of the things where everyone talks about engineers being incapable of designing something that works in the real world? Is that what we’re saying? [Laughter]
Matt: The next big thing [laughter].
Fraser: Okay, so the answer is... it’s the future.
Matt: Oh, yes!
Fraser: In The Genes is the future. Scientists based at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh are currently prototyping a technology that can be woven into items of clothing. While it’s still at the very early stages, they reckon that they will have it market-ready as early as 2026/27.
Matt: Good stuff. Right, well, that’s...
Fraser: Matt, how smug do you feel just now?
Matt: I feel great [laughter] and I’ll feel a lot better when I get that pair of Levi jeans in 2026 as well [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Well, listen, a big thank you to our guests there. We’ve had a lot of fun. Just a quick note to say if you’re wanting to connect and communicate about the episode today, please reach out via social media. We are @LocalZeroPod on Twitter. We’re also at www.LocalZeroPod.com if you want to connect with us there too but in the meantime, a big thank you to our guests.
Guy: Thanks a lot.
Alona: Thanks very much.
Matt: And we look forward to having you along soon. You’re always welcome back, so until then, take care.
Alona: Bye.
Guy: Bye-bye.
Rebecca: Bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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