̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Andrew Balmford

Rewilding in wealthy nations could drive extinctions in species-rich regions, experts warn

fpjl2 — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:28:04 +0000

Some efforts to preserve or rewild natural habitats are shifting harmful land use to other parts of the world – and this could drive an even steeper decline in the planet’s species, according to a team of conservation scientists and economists led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Researchers from over a dozen institutions worldwide have come together to call on the global community to acknowledge the ‘biodiversity leak’: the displacement of nature-damaging human activities caused by ringfencing certain areas for protection or restoration.

They argue that rewilding productive farmland or forestry in industrialised nations that have low levels of biodiversity may do more harm than good on a planetary scale.

Exploratory analysis by the team suggests that reclaiming typical UK cropland for nature may be five times more damaging for global biodiversity than the benefit it provides local species, due to the displacement of production to more biodiverse regions.

While this ‘leakage’ has been known about for decades, it is largely neglected in biodiversity conservation, say the researchers. They argue it undermines actions ranging from establishing new nature reserves to the EU’s environmental policies.

Writing in the journal Science, the experts point out that even the UN’s landmark Global Biodiversity Framework – aiming for 30% of the world’s land and seas to be conserved – makes no mention of the leakage problem.

“As nations in temperate regions such as Europe conserve more land, the resulting shortfalls in food and wood production will have to be made up somewhere,” said Professor Andrew Balmford, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

“Much of this is likely to happen in more biodiverse but often less well-regulated parts of the world, such as Africa and South America. Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak.”

“ ̽��ֱ��first thing we need to do is collectively acknowledge that these leaks exist,” said co-author Professor Brendan Fisher from the ̽��ֱ�� of Vermont. “If protesting a logging concession in the USA increases demand for pulp from the tropics, then we are unlikely to be helping biodiversity.”

Co-author Dr Ben Balmford of the ̽��ֱ�� of Exeter said: “This issue demands far greater attention from a sector that seeks to shape how 30% of an ever hungrier and more connected planet is managed.”

‘Leakage’ is already a major issue for carbon credits tied to forest preservation, say researchers. But they argue it’s a real problem for biodiversity conservation efforts too.

While protected areas can slow deforestation inside their borders, there’s evidence it can simply shift to neighbouring areas. Production can also be displaced much further. Efforts to protect the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests resulted in increased logging in other North American regions, for example.

Yet a survey of site managers of tropical conservation projects conducted by the Cambridge team found that 37% had not come across the concept of leakage, and less than half of the projects were attempting to curb any displacement damage.*

̽��ֱ��researchers explored how leakage caused by protected areas could affect global biodiversity by applying real-world food and biodiversity data to two hypothetical conservation projects.

They found that rewilding a sizeable area of Brazilian soybean farms would push production to nations such as Argentina and USA, but because Brazil is so important for biodiversity, the local conservation gains could be around five times greater than the displacement harms.

̽��ֱ��opposite would be true if the equivalent area of UK arable farmland was reclaimed for nature. Here, production would be displaced to Australia, Germany, Italy and Ukraine.**

As the UK has fewer species than these other countries, damage from ‘leakage’ could be five times greater than the local benefit to British biodiversity.

̽��ֱ��experts offer a number of ways to help plug the biodiversity leak. They call on governments and the conservation sector to take leakage far more seriously when making environmental policy at national and global level.

They also point out that leakage could be reduced if conservation projects work with others to reduce demand – especially for high-footprint commodities such as red meat.

There’s scope to limit leakage by targeting conservation to areas high in biodiversity but where current or potential production of food or timber is limited, say researchers. One example is restoring abandoned tropical shrimp farms to mangroves.

However, we should also be much more cautious about restoring natural habitats on currently productive farmland in less biodiverse parts of the world, they argue.

Beyond planning where to conserve, major conservation initiatives should work with partners in other sectors to support local farmers, so that overall levels of production are maintained in the region despite protected areas. ̽��ֱ��team cite examples ranging from forest-friendly chocolate to herding practices that protect snow leopards.

Where local yield increases are difficult, larger-scale programmes could establish long-range partnerships with suppliers in the same markets to make up shortfalls in production.

“Without attention and action, there is a real risk that the biodiversity leak will undermine hard-won conservation victories,” said co-author Dr Fiona Sanderson of the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, who works on reducing the impacts of cocoa production in Sierra Leone.

Lead author from Cambridge, Prof Andrew Balmford, added: “At its worst, we could see some conservation actions cause net global harm by displacing production to regions which are much more significant for biodiversity.”

*Survey of 100 practitioners involved in area-based tropical conservation projects, including directors, managers, coordinators, and researchers. Respondents came from 36 countries across all five continents. Further details: https://zenodo.org/records/14780198

** Two hypothetical habitat restoration programmes covering 1000km2 of Brazilian soy-producing land, and restoring 1000km2 of arable farmland in the UK that produces wheat, barley and oilseed rape.

Researchers call on the international community to recognise and start tackling the ‘biodiversity leak’.

Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak

Andrew Balmford

Michael Duff, © RSPB-images.com

̽��ֱ��Gola Rainforest Project in Sierra Leone. This conservation project has limited leakage while slowing deforestation by supporting nearby farmers such as Mallo Samah to increase their yields and get higher prices for their cocoa.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Pork labelling schemes ‘not helpful’ in making informed buying choices, say researchers

jg533 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 09:27:35 +0000

Researchers have evaluated different types of pig farming – including woodland, organic, free range, RSPCA assured, and Red Tractor certified, to assess each systems’ impact across four areas: land use (representing biodiversity loss), greenhouse gas emissions, antibiotics use and animal welfare. Their study concludes that none of the farm types performed consistently well across all four areas – a finding that has important implications for increasingly climate conscious consumers, as well as farmers themselves.

However, there were individual farms that did perform well in all domains, including an indoor Red Tractor farm, an outdoor bred, indoor finished RSPCA assured farm and fully outdoor woodland farm. “Outliers like these show that trade-offs are not inevitable,” said lead author Dr Harriet Bartlett, Research Associate at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, who was formerly at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“Somewhat unexpectedly we found that a handful of farms perform far better than average across all four of our environmental and welfare measures,” added senior author Andrew Balmford, Professor of Conservation Science at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. However, none of the current label or assurance schemes predicted which farms these would be.

“ ̽��ֱ��way we classify farm types and label pork isn’t helpful for making informed decisions when it comes to buying more sustainable meat. Even more importantly, we aren’t rewarding and incentivising the best-performing farmers. Instead of focusing on farm types or practices, we need to focus on meaningful outcomes for people, the planet and the pigs – and assess, and reward farms based on these,” said Bartlett.

̽��ֱ��findings also show that common assumptions around food labelling can be misplaced. For instance, Organic farming systems, which consumers might see as climate and environmentally friendly, have on average three times the CO2 output per kg of meat of more intensive Red Tractor or RSPCA assured systems and four times the land use. However, these same systems use on average almost 90% fewer antibiotic medicines, and result in improved animal welfare compared with production from Red tractor or RSPCA assured systems.

̽��ֱ��way we classify livestock farms must be improved, Bartlett says, because livestock production is growing rapidly, especially pork production, which has quadrupled in the past 50 years and already accounts for 9% of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Pig farming also uses more antibiotics than any other livestock sector, and 8.5% of all arable land.

“Our findings show that mitigating the environmental impacts of livestock farming isn’t a case of saying which farm type is the best,” said Bartlett. “There is substantial scope for improvement within types, and our current means of classification is not identifying the best farms for the planet and animals overall. Instead, we need to identify farms that successfully limit their impacts across all areas of societal concern, and understand, promote and incentivise their practises.”

̽��ֱ��study reached its conclusions using data from 74 UK and 17 Brazilian breed-to-finish systems, each made up of 1-3 farms and representing the annual production of over 1.2 million pigs. It is published today in the journal Nature Food.

“To the best of our knowledge, our dataset covers by far the largest and most diverse sample of pig production systems examined in any single study,” said Bartlett.

James Wood, Professor of Equine and Farm Animal Science at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, commented: “This important study identifies a key need to clarify what different farm labels should indicate to consumers; there is a pressing need to extend this work into other farming sectors. It also clearly demonstrates the critical importance that individual farmers play in promoting best practice across all farming systems.”

Trade-offs in the externalities of pig production are not inevitable was authored by academics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of São Paulo.

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Reference: Bartlett, H.,‘Trade-offs in the externalities of pig production are not inevitable.’ Nature Food, April 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s43016-024-00921-2

Adapted from a press release by the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford.

Farmers don’t have to choose between lowering environmental impact and improving welfare for their pigs, a new study has found: it is possible to do both. But this is not reflected in the current food labelling schemes relied on by consumers.

̽��ֱ��way we classify farm types and label pork isn’t helpful for making informed decisions when it comes to buying more sustainable meat.

Harriet Bartlett

Charity Burggraaf/ Getty

Two pigs on a farm

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Offset markets: new approach could help save tropical forests by restoring faith in carbon credits

jg533 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:15:05 +0000

A new approach to valuing the carbon storage potential of natural habitats aims to help restore faith in offset schemes, by enabling investors to directly compare carbon credit pricing across a wide range of projects.

Current valuation methods for forest conservation projects have come under heavy scrutiny, leading to a crisis of confidence in carbon markets. This is hampering efforts to offset unavoidable carbon footprints, mitigate climate change, and scale up urgently needed investment in tropical forest conservation.

Measuring the value of carbon storage is not easy. Recent research revealed that as little as 6% of carbon credits from voluntary REDD+ schemes result in preserved forests. And the length of time these forests are preserved is critical to the climate benefits achieved.

Now, a team led by scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has invented a more reliable and transparent way of estimating the benefit of carbon stored because of forest conservation.

̽��ֱ��method is published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. In it, the researchers argue that saving tropical forests is not only vital for biodiversity, but also a much less expensive way of balancing emissions than most of the current carbon capture and storage technologies.

̽��ֱ��new approach works a bit like a lease agreement: carbon credits are issued to tropical forest projects that store carbon for a predicted amount of time. ̽��ֱ��valuation is front-loaded, because more trees protected now means less carbon released to the atmosphere straight away.

̽��ֱ��technique involves deliberately pessimistic predictions of when stored carbon might be released, so that the number of credits issued is conservative. But because forests can now be monitored by remote sensing, if projects do better than predicted – which they usually will – they can be rewarded through the issue of further credits.

̽��ֱ��payments encourage local people to protect forests: the carbon finance they receive can help provide alternative livelihoods that don’t involve cutting down trees.

And by allowing for future payments, the new method generates incentives for safeguarding forests long after credits have been issued. This contrasts with the current approach, which passes on a burden for conservation to future generations without compensation for lost livelihoods.

̽��ֱ��approach also allows different types of conservation projects to be compared in a like-for-like manner.

“Until now there hasn’t been a satisfactory way of directly comparing technological solutions with nature-based solutions for carbon capture. This has caused a lack of enthusiasm for investing in carbon credits linked to tropical forest protection,” said Dr Tom Swinfield, a researcher in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and senior author of the study.

He added: “Tropical forests are being cleared so quickly that if we don’t protect them now, we’re not going to make the vital progress we need towards net-zero. Buying carbon credits linked to their protection is one of the best ways to do this.”

Tropical forests play a key role in taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, helping to reduce global warming and avert climate catastrophe. But the carbon they capture is not taken out of the atmosphere permanently: forests can be destroyed by pests, floods, fire, wind – and by human clearance.

This impermanence, and therefore the difficulty of reliably measuring the long-term climate benefit of tropical forest protection, has made it an unattractive proposition for investors wanting to offset their carbon emissions.

And this is despite it being a far cheaper investment than more permanent, technology-based methods of carbon capture and storage.

Protection of tropical forests, a nature-based solution to climate change, comes with additional benefits: helping to conserve biodiversity, and supporting the livelihoods of people living near the forests.

“Nature-based carbon solutions are highly undervalued right now because the market doesn’t know how to account for the fact that forests aren’t a permanent carbon storage solution. Our method takes away a lot of the uncertainties,” said Anil Madhavapeddy, a Professor in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who was involved in the study.

̽��ֱ��new method, developed by scientists at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter and the London School of Economics, is called ‘Permanent Additional Carbon Tonne' (PACT) accounting, and can be used to value a wide range of nature-based solutions.

“Carbon finance is a way for us – the carbon emitters of the richer world – to direct funds towards rural communities in the tropics so they can get more out of the land they have, without cutting down more trees,” said Andrew Balmford, Professor of Conservation Science at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and first author of the paper.

Co-author Srinivasan Keshav, Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge added: “Our new approach has the potential to address market concerns around nature-based solutions to carbon offsetting, and lead to desperately needed investment.”

Conversion of tropical forest to agricultural land results in vast carbon emissions. Around 30% of all progress towards the ambitious net-zero commitments made at COP26 is reliant on better management of carbon in nature.

Other carbon credit investment options include technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lock it deep in the Earth for hundreds of years. These permanent storage options may currently be easier to value, say the researchers, but they typically cost substantially more than nature-based solutions and do nothing to protect natural habitats that are vital in regulating the global climate and mitigating the extinction crisis.

̽��ֱ��research was funded primarily by the Tezos Foundation. It was conducted by researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.

Reference: Balmford, A et al.: ‘Realising the social value of impermanent carbon credits.’ Nature Climate Change, October 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01815-0

Cost to protect globally important forests falls disproportionately on those living closest

jg533 — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:52:53 +0000

Local communities are not incentivised to protect tropical forests that are hugely valuable for global climate regulation, a new study has found. International funding could help smallholder farmers to boost yields on their existing land to incentivise long-term forest protection.

Current conservation policies risk damaging global biodiversity, warn researchers

jg533 — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:15:55 +0000

These ‘Green’ farming policies risk worsening the global biodiversity crisis by reducing how much food is produced in a region, driving up food imports and increasing environmental damage overseas.

In an article published today in the journal Nature, Professor Andrew Balmford at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and Professor Ian Bateman at the ̽��ֱ�� of Exeter, urge policy-makers to consider a bolder approach known as ‘land sparing’ - which they argue is cheaper, more effective, and avoids displacing food production and worsening the loss of wildlife habitats overseas.

Land sparing involves finding lower-impact ways to boost yields in farmed areas, and allow larger, non-farmed areas of the landscape to be put aside for nature - without increasing imports and damaging overseas wildlife.

̽��ֱ��researchers say the approach has been overlooked by policymakers because of a failure to consider the wider consequences of changes in land management. They argue that changes that boost wildlife locally seem superficially attractive, but if food production is reduced there are unavoidable knock-on effects elsewhere that must also be taken into account.

They also cite the influence of the ‘Big Farm’ lobby in maintaining the status quo in agricultural policy, with land-sharing subsidies allocated using a flat rate per hectare, which disproportionately benefits the biggest farms – resulting in the largest 12 per cent of farms taking 50 per cent of all UK taxpayer subsidies.

Their article debunks some of the benefits to biodiversity of three widely-advocated green farming approaches.

They argue that while policy funded measures such as reducing the use of pesticides and fertilisers can sometimes increase populations of more common animals and plants on farms it does little for endangered birds, invertebrates, plants and fungi species that need larger stretches of non-farmed habitat – and by lowering yields can also make matters far worse for overseas biodiversity.

Rewilding initiatives, where large areas of land are taken out of farming, can indeed benefit locally endangered species. But unless other areas see compensating increases in food output then this reduces local production, increases demand for food imports, and so damages biodiversity overseas.

They also argue that organic farming, where crops are produced without manufactured fertilisers and modern pesticides, is even more likely to be damaging. Relatively few species will benefit in the farmed area, and the substantially lower yields from this type of farming risk greatly increasing the need for food imports, and hence a country’s impacts on biodiversity elsewhere.

Land sparing, in contrast, involves retaining or creating sizeable blocks of unfarmed land containing larger populations of the many species that depend on natural habitats, as well as boosting farm yields elsewhere in the region so that overall production is maintained or even increased.

Promising methods to boost crop and livestock yields more sustainably than current high-yield practices include genomic screening and gene editing to accelerate animal and crop breeding; using new advances in aquaculture to produce high value foods with much lower environmental impacts; and, in tropical countries, greater access to improved pasture and veterinary care.

̽��ֱ��researchers point to field studies on five continents that consistently show how land sparing delivers far greater biodiversity gains than conventional ‘nature friendly farming’ policies.

They say it is likely to cost a great deal less as well: a survey of UK farmers last year found that land sparing could deliver the same biodiversity outcomes for birds as conventional approaches but at 48 per cent of the cost to taxpayers, and with a 21 per cent lower impact on food production.

Professor Bateman, a Professor of Environmental Economics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Exeter Business School who has advised seven UK secretaries of state for the environment in the past decade, said:

“ ̽��ֱ��stakes are too high for policymakers to continue to ignore the promise of land sparing when so much research demonstrates that it is a far more effective approach than many of the strategies being deployed.

“Unless researchers and policymakers assess the overall, global effects of interventions aimed at addressing biodiversity loss and climate change, poor decisions that are unsupported by the data will at best under-deliver, and at worst exacerbate existential threats posed by the extinction and climate crises.”

Andrew Balmford, a Professor of Conservation Science at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge who has led 20 years’ work investigating how to reconcile food production with biodiversity conservation, added:

“This issue has become even more urgent since last December when many countries agreed to help meet the Convention on Biological Diversity’s goal of protecting 30 per cent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.

“Exactly how this 30 per cent will be put aside - and how we meet humanity’s growing needs on the rest of planet - will in large part determine the biodiversity consequences of this ambitious commitment.”

Reference

Bateman, I. and Balmford, A.: ‘Current conservation policies risk accelerating biodiversity loss.’ Nature, June 2023.

Adapted from a press release by the ̽��ֱ�� of Exeter.

Rewilding, organic farming and the so-called ‘nature friendly farming’ measures included in some government conservation policies may accelerate global biodiversity loss, say two leading researchers.

Joyce G on Unsplash

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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New animal welfare scoring system could enable better-informed food and farming choices

jg533 — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:01:30 +0000

This means that animal welfare can now, for the first time, be properly considered alongside other impacts of farming to help identify which farming systems are best.

This is vital for improving animal welfare in livestock production, at a time when demand for meat is rising globally and the way animals are farmed is changing - with concerns about the welfare of intensive and indoor systems.

Animal welfare assessments could also enable consumers to be better informed when choosing what to eat.

Britain has various labelling schemes for meat products to assure consumers that certain standards have been met. ̽��ֱ��team used their new system to test how the different labels compare in terms of animal welfare.

Farms producing ‘woodland’ labelled pork products scored best for pig welfare, followed by ‘organic’, then free-range, RSPCA assured, Red Tractor, and finally those with no certification.

“We have shown that it’s possible to reliably assess animal welfare on farms. This means decisions about which types of farm are better or worse for animal welfare can be based on proper calculations, rather than assumptions – as is currently the case,” said Dr Harriet Bartlett, first author of the study, who carried out this work while a researcher at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine. She is now a Research Associate in Sustainable Food Solutions at the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford.

Bartlett added: “Now animal welfare can be included in overall assessments of farm sustainability alongside other measures like carbon emissions and biodiversity impacts, so we can make better informed decisions about how we choose to farm and what we choose to eat.”

Coming up with an overall measurement of animal welfare has previously been difficult because of disagreement on which factors are most important. For example, is a health problem more important than a behaviour problem? What level of welfare is good enough?

̽��ֱ��new system assesses the quality of an animal’s life through a wide-ranging set of welfare measurements, reflecting a range of concerns about welfare. ̽��ֱ��results can be integrated into a single score to enable comparison across farms.

This will enable exploration of trade-offs between animal welfare and other issues of concern to consumers, such as the impact of farming on the environment.

̽��ֱ��results are published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Assessment of the pigs looked at everything from health problems like coughing, sneezing, and lameness, to the way they interacted: biting each other’s ears or tails, or engaging with their environment, for example.

Various scoring methods were tested - giving more or less weight to the different aspects of animal welfare - on 74 pig farming systems in the UK. ̽��ֱ��team were surprised to find that each method gave broadly the same overall result in terms of which farms, and types of farms, performed best and worst.

“Despite ongoing debate about how to measure animal welfare, we found we can identify which types of farms we might want to encourage and which we shouldn’t with reasonable consistency,” said Professor Andrew Balmford in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who was involved in the study.

̽��ֱ��new welfare measurements combine quality of life with length of life, and scores can be produced ‘per unit’ of production. ̽��ֱ��welfare scores can also allow several farms to be grouped together – for example when animals are kept on different farms at different growth stages.

“This work opens up possibilities for greater rolling out of welfare assessment scores in food labelling, including in other species as well as pigs. Until now, the methods available have made this impractical,” said Professor James Wood at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, who was involved in the study.

̽��ֱ��technique of ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ is widely used to quantify environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use, across all stages of farm animal production. But until now there hasn’t been a way of measuring animal welfare that enables valid comparisons across different farming systems, so Life Cycle Assessments do not include it and as a result, welfare concerns have sometimes been overlooked.

Food production accounts for over a quarter of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Making farming systems more sustainable, in the face of growing global demand for meat, is a major challenge for farmers and the government.

‘Woodland’ labelled pork is from farms that provide at least partial tree cover for the pigs, and ‘Organic’ provides outdoor access for the animals. ̽��ֱ��‘RSPCA assured’ label is welfare focused, while ‘Free range’ is not a formal assurance, but typically refers to fully outdoor farming systems. Most UK pig farms produce ‘Red Tractor’ labelled pork, which has lower production costs – translating to a lower price for consumers.

This research was funded by the BBSRC, the Royal Society, MRC, and ̽��ֱ��Alborada Trust.

Reference

Bartlett, H. et al: ‘Advancing the quantitative characterisation of farm animal welfare.’ Proc Roy Soc B. March 2023. DOI 10.1098/rspb.2023.0120

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� scientists have come up with a system of measuring animal welfare that enables reliable comparison across different types of pig farming.

Harriet Bartlett

Pigs on a farm

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Paying farmers to create woodland and wetland is the most cost-effective way to hit UK environment targets

fpjl2 — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:58:28 +0000

Incentivising farmers to restore some land as habitats for nature could deliver UK climate and biodiversity targets at half the taxpayer cost of integrating nature into land managed for food production, according to a new study published today in the British Ecological Society journal People and Nature.

̽��ֱ��research, led by the universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Glasgow, provides the first evidence for the taxpayer savings offered by focusing food production in certain areas to allow the creation of new woods, wetland and scrub habitats on some of the land currently used for farming.

̽��ֱ��study suggests that this 'land sparing' approach would cost just 48% of the funds required to achieve the same outcomes for biodiversity and the climate through an approach known as 'land sharing', where conservation measures get mixed into farming by adding hedgerows to fields, reducing pesticides, and so on – all of which lowers food yield.

Additionally, researchers say that trying to share land with nature through making farming more wildlife-friendly would see the UK lose 30% more of its food production capacity than if farmers are encouraged to spare portions of land entirely for creating semi-natural habitats.

̽��ֱ��UK Government has legally binding commitments to reverse nature declines by 2030 and reach net-zero carbon by 2050. Sparing land for habitats could hit these targets at half the cost of trying to farm on land shared with nature, say researchers.

“Currently, only a fraction of the £3.2 billion of public money annually paid to farmers goes on biodiversity and climate mitigation, some £600m a year,” said Lydia Collas, who led the study as part of her PhD at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Zoology.

“Almost all this fraction of funding supports land-sharing approaches that may do little to benefit species or sequester carbon, but do typically reduce food yields. Until now there has been no research on whether this is the most cost-effective solution to delivering environmental targets.”

Cambridge’s Prof Andrew Balmford, senior author of the study, said: “Greater incentives for farmers to create woodlands and wetlands will deliver for wild species and climate mitigation at half the cost to the taxpayer of the land-sharing approach that currently receives ten times more public funding.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say their findings – presented at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting by study co-author Prof Nick Hanley, an environmental economist from the ̽��ֱ�� of Glasgow – should inform the current Brexit-prompted rethink of England’s new Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMs).

̽��ֱ��Landscape Recovery strand of the ELM is set to receive under 1% of the overall budget next year – a dramatic underspend considering the economic, environmental and food security benefits of a habitat creation approach, argue the scientists.

They say that the revamped Countryside Stewardship Scheme would also deliver far better value for money if it supports farmers to create habitats for nature instead of repeating the largely 'wildlife-friendly' approach of the scheme in its current form.

“If a two-fold cost saving was identified in other government policy areas, such as health, there would be an outcry,” said Collas, “particularly in the face of the worst recession in a generation.”

̽��ֱ��researchers conducted a choice experiment study with 118 farmers responsible for 1.7% of all England’s arable land, asking them to estimate the payments they would require to implement land-sharing practices or habitat-creating 'sparing' approaches on their land.

Farmers chose from a variety of agricultural approaches, nature interventions and, crucially, payment rates. ̽��ֱ��study also considered the government's costs of administering and monitoring these schemes.

̽��ֱ��team used three bird species – yellowhammers, bullfinches and lapwings – as a proxy for effects on biodiversity, as well a range of ways farmers could help slow climate change, such as woodland and hedgerow creation.

On average, farmers in the experiment accepted lower payments per hectare for land sharing practices. However, habitat creation schemes deliver far greater environmental outcomes per hectare, so creating woodlands, wetlands and scrublands would deliver the same overall biodiversity and climate mitigation benefits at half the cost to the taxpayer.

“We found that enough farmers are willing to substantially change their business to benefit from payments for public goods in the form of habitats, provided the government rewards them properly for doing so,” said Balmford.

Collas, now a Policy Analyst at Green Alliance, added: “Existing evidence already shows that semi-natural habitats deliver far more biodiversity and climate mitigation per unit area, and creating them has far less impact on food production than meeting targets through land sharing.

“This evidence is dismissed when thinking about agricultural policy in the UK because of an untested assumption that farmers are unwilling to create natural habitat. We now have evidence showing this assumption is wrong.”

Study of farmer preferences shows that turning whole areas of farmland into habitats comes with half the price tag of integrating nature into productive farmland, if biodiversity and carbon targets are to be met.

Semi-natural habitats deliver far more biodiversity and climate mitigation per unit area

Lydia Collas

Getty images

Drone view of agricultural field - a tractor is baling hay next to woodland

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Intensive farming may actually reduce risk of pandemics, experts argue

cg605 — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:18:00 +0000

In the wake of COVID-19, many have pointed to modern industrial farms with tightly-packed livestock as potential hothouses for further pandemics caused by 'zoonotic' diseases: those transmitted from animals to humans.

However, researchers now argue that free-range alternatives, which require far more land, would increase encroachment on natural habitats and create ever more potential for diseases carried by wild animals to come into contact with humans and jump the species barrier.

In a paper in Royal Society Open Science, a team of scientists led by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� found a lack of sufficient evidence to conclude which way of farming is least risky, and say there is evidence that the move away from intensive farming might actually increase the risk of pandemics. They call for more research to be done before changing policies or incentivising a particular type of farming.

"High-yield or ‘intensive’ livestock farming is blamed for pandemics, but those calling for a move away from intensive farming often fail to consider the counterfactual – the pandemic risk of farming less intensively and particularly the consequences for land use,” said lead author Harriet Bartlett, a PhD candidate at Cambridge's Department of Zoology.

“Low-yield farms need far more land to produce the same amount of food compared with high-yield farms. A widespread switch to low-yield farming would result in the destruction and disturbance of vast areas of natural habitats. This increases the risk of viral spillover by disturbing wildlife that may well host the next pandemic virus and increasing contact between wildlife, people and livestock," Bartlett said.

̽��ֱ��researchers point out that, globally, we now produce four times more meat than we did in the 1960s. Most of our meat, eggs and dairy now come from intensive farms, but such farms are thought be risky due to their crowded conditions which increase the chance of diseases ‘taking off’ and spreading rapidly.

However, intensive farms need less land than extensive, or ‘free-range’, farms to produce the same amount of food – both to grow their feed and to rear their animals.

Growing demand for livestock products has caused dramatic habitat loss, say the researchers, which means we are now farming in places where livestock and people are coming into frequent contact with wildlife. They say that this contact with increasingly disturbed, stressed, and infected wildlife makes the spillover of zoonotic viruses into people or livestock more likely.

"If we were to switch from the current system to one based on extensive farming, we would need substantially more land to meet demand – resulting in the conversion of habitat roughly the size of Brazil and India between 2009 and 2050," said paper co-author Prof Andrew Balmford. "This could increase the contact between people, livestock and stressed wildlife – including wildlife that might well host the next pandemic virus."

"Intensive farms may have a greater risk of takeoff, but extensive farms may have greater risk of spillover," he said.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that, worryingly, we simply do not know which risk is more important for preventing future pandemics, and so it is currently impossible to determine which types of farms carry least risk overall.

Added Bartlett: "COVID-19 has demonstrated the huge potential impact of zoonotic diseases, and this study highlights that more research is urgently needed to identify how we minimise the risk of another pandemic."

Reference:

Bartlett H, Holmes MA, Petrovan SO, Williams DR, Wood JLN, Balmford A. 2022 Understanding the relative risks of zoonosis emergence under contrasting approaches to meeting livestock product demand. R. Soc. Open Sci. 9: 211573. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211573

Scientists evaluate the evidence that intensive livestock farming is causing pandemics, and find that intensive farming could actually reduce the risk of future pandemics compared to 'free-range' farming.

Those calling for a move away from intensive farming often fail to consider the counterfactual

Harriet Bartlett

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Portrait of young woman farmer holding fresh eggs in hands

Yes

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Andrew Balmford

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