The UK is a small place with just over 93,000 square miles of land facing unprecedented pressures from a multitude of sources.
The demand for 250,000 new homes per year, the space for new transport infrastructure such as the HS2 high speed railway, the fields for energy sourcing from renewables like solar power and wind farms as well as sites for fracking for gas, and the plans for additional water reservoirs and the setting aside of large areas for natural flood defence and abatement, all compete for space.
This is set to become even more important in a post-Brexit world, with perhaps an increased need to use land for food production.
Add to this the necessity to adapt to climate change, as well as provide some room for nature’s ecosystems and satisfying the human desire for recreation in open space, and you get a sense of the challenge.
Yet, as a modern sophisticated nation, and one of the world’s most advanced economies, the approach to dealing with these competing pressures is surprisingly archaic.
In essence the UK has muddled through decisions on land use for centuries and continues to do so, using a combination of hegemony, historical precedence, ownership rights and emotions which translate in modern times into the blunt unsophisticated instruments of planning controls and siloed sector specific regulations.
The reality is that, today, there is no clear, logical or meaningful framework for sustainably resolving these conflicting demands and the UK is poorly prepared to meet the considerable land use challenges of the years ahead. <
UK land use has been an emotive topic at least since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.
Modern feelings about people’s relationship with land were aroused powerfully in the Victorian era by romantic notions of the pastoral idyll and sanctity of pristine wilderness, matured in the mid-20th century with Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and the emergence of the modern environmental movement, and consolidated more recently in the intransigence of an almost universal ‘nimby’ culture.
The net result has been a messy, illogical and distinctly suboptimal concoction of contradictory guidance, controls, regulations and decision making frameworks.
Starting from scratch, with a clean piece of paper, would the UK really be using its land for the purposes that it does today?
Are the Welsh hills best used for upland hill farming instead of water capture, flood mitigation or wind farming? Should there be fracking for gas in the North West instead of grazing cows for dairy? Is covering fields with solar panels an optimised use of land in the south west of England and is the greenbelt the place for new homes or recreation? From a scientific and engineering perspective, at the moment we just don’t know.
Looking at this logically, all the competing human demands on land use can be corralled into just four underlying areas: food, water, energy and land. Resolving questions of what to use land for should therefore involve consideration of the meeting point of these four areas. We need to understand the balance between them and what it tells us the starting point for an optimum outcome should be. From that point informed trade-offs can be made to reach the best decision in the context of sustainability, resilience and national and local need.
At its simplest level this means, for example, if it were proposed to cover a field with solar panels for electricity production, we should seek out a scientific assessment of the optimum use for that piece of land.
This involves asking questions such as: would a better use for it be some form of agriculture or horticulture or aquaculture, water supply or flood mitigation, another form of energy sourcing, or to meet a building, recreation or ecosystems need?
Questions that would include assessing the impact of one choice upon the others, for example, would the field’s use for solar power lead to local flooding or a loss of vital food production?
Once this is determined, the impact upon the food-water-energy-land relationship of making a particular choice can be known, and an informed decision making process may begin.
What happens instead today is that an application is made into the UK’s planning system and a whole ad-hoc, muddled and suboptimal smorgasbord of EU, national and local procedures, policies, strategies and regulations can come into play.
This risks poor decision making and failures such as the unforeseen impact of the rush to biofuel production on water supply, food prices and global trade.
At a much more sophisticated level, a food-water-energy-land nexus approach would mean predetermining the optimum use of all the nation’s land based on such an assessment and zoning accordingly.
In other words, putting in place a UK land use policy that aimed to deliver the best, most sustainable and resilient outcome for the overall benefit of the nation. Undertaking such an exercise could result in a radically different pattern of land use across the UK.
Brexit provides the UK with a unique opportunity to step back, reconsider its relationship with the nation’s land, and put in place a new framework and methodologies fit-for-purpose in the 21st century.
Moving away from four decades of land use policy development rooted in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and subjected to externally imposed environmental regulations, allows the UK to seize the moment and develop a policy approach based on the food-water-energy-land nexus.
Although doing so will not be easy with thinking about the nexus in its infancy, others such as Indonesia and Kenya have already begun the process through the work of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN). Such are the unprecedented pressures on the nation’s land use that it would be remiss not to try.
The UK can’t keep muddling through in the existing system and making poor decisions, the time is right for a radical and transformational overall of what it does with its land.
Dr Tim Fox is Chair, Food and Drink Engineering Committee, Institution of Mechanical Engineers.