The land use framework for England that the government is scheduled to publish in the summer should be a useful tool for assessing and grappling with the changes that need to be brought about in the coming decades. New impetus is clearly needed, given the slow rate of progress in recent years, for example in expanding higher tier agri-environment schemes and establishing more tree cover. This represents a challenge for the whole of the UK and not only for England. But is England the first to grapple with this challenge? Are others moving forward as well? David Baldock digs deeper.
The recent progress report to Parliament from the Climate Change Committee states that “tree planting and peatland restoration rates are significantly off track and will both need to more than double to get as close as possible to the UK’s targets of 30,000 ha new woodland creation per year by 2025 and 32,000 ha peatland restoration per year by 2026”. Larger scale changes are required to meet a combination of environmental targets for reducing nutrient pollution, restoring biodiversity, reducing flooding, improving soil health, cutting air pollution and other priorities. In the process negative impacts on food production need to be kept to a minimum.
To varying degrees other European countries have similar challenges to address, not least to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture and restore biodiversity, although most already have more tree cover than England. The extent of peatland and potential for re-wetting is much greater in some countries than others and is concentrated in northwest Europe. In southern Europe there is widespread soil erosion and areas of serious over exploitation of groundwater for irrigation. Important though it is to recognise this diversity, the need to adapt both agricultural management and land use is evident across the continent.
Getting the political mandate and policy impetus to drive substantial change is a different matter. Denmark is probably the only country where a technically sophisticated but politically driven process has led to the negotiation of an ambitious multi-faceted programme designed to achieve extensive rural land use change by 2045. The active participation of farming and food industry bodies as well as government agencies and environmental NGOs was an essential element of this. It has been agreed only recently and still far from implemented but there may be lessons to be learned from the Danish approach, tackling related issues together and using a full spectrum of policies in an integrated plan involving the use of both incentives and penalties.
The “Green Tripartite Plan” agreed in 2024 after extensive consultation and political bargaining, is intended to achieve large scale changes in land use, reductions in GHG emissions from agriculture, particularly from livestock, reduced nutrient pollution and enhanced biodiversity . One key objective is to set aside around 15% of agricultural land to establish 250,000ha of new forest by 2045 and rewet and restore 140,000ha of drained peatland now in agricultural use by 2030, creating more natural habitats, and 6 new national nature parks [1].
These elements are only part of an ambitious plan to reduce the substantial climate footprint of Danish agriculture. This involves a new CO2e tax, covering emissions from livestock, peatland, liming and F-gases, complemented by payments for reducing fertilizer use and incorporating biochar in agricultural soils to store carbon [2] [3].
This is a more ambitious and radical approach than appears likely in the near future in England and a sizeable budget is being made available to implement it. So is it of any relevance to building a more future-focused approach to rural land use in England? Potentially yes.
• The scale of agreed change is proportionately greater than envisaged in England in the analysis accompanying the recent consultation paper and over a shorter timescale, by 2045 rather than 2050. This underlines the need to think on the right scale and sufficiently far ahead.
• The potential for applying an integrated approach is also notable. One of several considerations driving the plan and some of the geographical targeting is the need to make major reductions in both GHG emissions and nutrient pollution, taking account of emissions from a range of sources, including peatland, livestock and fertiliser use on arable land. In England the Nitrogen surplus per hectare of measured agricultural land was around 74kg per hectare in 2022, one of the highest in Europe but there has been little progress in bringing it down. More action will be needed to meet binding environmental targets and there is clearly scope for a strategy in England that tackles these related issues together at the national and more local levels, as recommended in a recent report by IEEP and Aether on reducing nitrogen pollution in the UK.
• The Danish experience also confirms the need to debate and estimate the impact of such plans on food production. In the case of Denmark, where the intention is to drive down emissions much faster than in the UK, it is estimated that production may fall by about 4% by 2030.
• Rewetting lowland peat is a substantive component of the plan, reducing emissions and contributing to biodiversity conservation and accepting some impact on food production.
• The planning and stakeholder engagement process is instructive. There are both national and local components to the planning process. It includes a role for new local Green Tripartite Councils and coastal water councils, which will include a range of stakeholders as well as local authorities. They are intended to bring substantive collaboration to planning and making changes in land use and subsequent management, including the steps required for meeting targets locally [4]. Their experience might provide pointers to how the forthcoming framework in England could be implemented locally with well chosen governance arrangements and effective local engagement.
No two countries are the same and there are special conditions in Denmark as there are in England. Nonetheless, it seems likely that there is more than a little to be learned from one of the leaders in tackling the land use equation.
[1] https://pub.norden.org/temanord2025-524/4-denmark.html
[2] https://concito.dk/en/node/3817
[3] See also: https://ieep.uk/news/blog-what-should-and-shouldnt-the-uk-take-from-the-danish-tax-on-ghg-emissions-from-agriculture/
Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash