Today, I am writing this on the train,
heading back home from an extremely informative meeting in Brussels. A few hundred metres up the road, Boris
Johnson was confirming a deal for the UK’s departure from the EU, but whether
that will happen continues to remain uncertain. Such is the opposition in the UK to the
current version of Brexit that even now it is hard to know whether this has
been my last visit to the continent as an EU citizen.
My reason for going to Brussels this
time was to learn from a range of EU partners about the latest developments in results-based
payments for biodiversity, a topic that may take on heightened relevance as the
UK proposes to move from agri-environment schemes that make payments to cover income
forgone and costs of habitat creation and management, to one that is based on
delivery of services with uncertain rates of remuneration for farmers.
The GWCT pioneered farmer clusters in
which farmers take ownership of landscape scale wildlife conservation,
incorporating their own initiatives with existing Stewardship schemes as part
of their approach. However, as we have
discovered in our own landscape scale research, highly motivated pioneering
farmers and iconic species on which to focus are not present everywhere. The results-based approach, alongside
conventional management-based approaches to deliver environmental objectives,
could well play an important part in rolling out landscape scale wildlife
conservation. The broad approach may
also have a role to play in achieving wider environmental objectives.
Back in 1999 I was in Brussels from time
to time, reporting to the EU Environment Directorate on a commissioned review
of environmental impacts of western European arable farming systems, work that
found its way into the public domain in the form of a paper in Journal of
Environmental Management. A decade
later, I led a follow-up paper with various European authors, this time also taking
into account grazing livestock systems, and the Eastern European countries
which had recently joined the EU. Drawing
on the latest scientific research, including our own, these two papers
highlighted the range of environmental issues requiring attention, the
opportunities arising from reform of the CAP to develop agri-environment
schemes to cover the economic costs of addressing them, and the importance of a
Europe-wide but locally relevant approach across the member states.
Environmental issues have become no less
important or urgent over the intervening twenty years, with ever increasing scientific
evidence and associated concern about biodiversity loss and what is now
generally accepted within the scientific community as a climate crisis. The science has been clear throughout that
time but is now all the more so. It is
no longer alarmist to say that the future prospects of our own society are
inextricably bound up with these enormously complex and integrated global issues. How we manage agricultural land in the next
few years has a substantial impact on how things play out, and that is not
something that can be done by individual countries in isolation. The UK may be leaving the EU, but whatever
happens with Brexit, it will not be leaving Europe.
While increasing emphasis is needed on
the environmental objectives for land management, as we stated in our two
journal papers, it is imperative that food production is maintained at local
and national scales, both to ensure national food security and to avoid
exporting negative impacts to other parts of the world. There are strong social, cultural, economic
and environmental reasons for not sacrificing UK farm businesses on the Brexit altar.
The development and implementation of effective
evidence-based agri-environmental management must also be conducted quickly,
drawing on the many experiences of recent projects across Europe, including our
own research at the Allerton Project. While
the Brexit process may accommodate repeated resetting of deadlines, the
environment on which we depend will not.
