Mark Dick, a GP based in Northern Ireland and the author of Towards Oikos, with part four of his series on a better food system on the other side of crisis. See previous posts here.
So far in my series on the global food system, we have looked at food waste, and rebalancing the roles of plant and animal agriculture, along with other changes. This is important for the future, but a lot of damage has already been done. So along with preventing further harm, we also need to look at how to heal and restore the land.
One area to prioritise is upland peatlands, which are a major carbon store. Upland peatland restoration could be taken forward in the short-term with a ban on blanket bog burning and a regulatory requirement on water companies to restore peatland that they own or manage.
In the long term, public ownership of upland peatland may be a potential answer for the most important sites. Under a transfer to public ownership, landowners could be compensated through a sale consideration and offered lifetime beneficial use of the land and farm buildings. The public owner could then engage in restoration on a large scale. An alternative, if public ownership proves unacceptable, is to invite NGOs to take on ownership. In the longer term, any of the above options could be run in parallel with the issuance of carbon credits from peatland restoration, making these eligible in a UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), using a modified version of the Peatland Code to estimate emissions reductions.
There are several policies for lowland peatland. The first is a ban on peat extraction and sale. The second is a regulatory requirement not to leave soil bare. The third, a requirement on Internal Drainage Boards to maintain water tables at a minimum level. The viability of a policy involving requirements on Internal Drainage Boards is pending on-going work by the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) on sustainable management practices on lowland peat. A system of Environmental Land Management payments for lowland peatland restoration could also be envisaged, in which options would be specifically targeted at emissions reductions. In the longer term, carbon credits from peatland restoration could be made eligible in the UK ETS (Vivid Economics, 2020).
Another area to invest in is tree planting, and who better to listen to than Guy Shrubsole, author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain:
“We’ve developed something of a mania for planting trees in modern Britain. It’s become our new civic religion: each November we now celebrate National Tree Week and make our votive offerings by digging a hole in the ground and planting a sapling in it. Don’t get me wrong – I love planting trees, and it is often a good thing to do. But we seem to have forgotten the fact that trees have been capable of naturally regenerating and spreading for millions of years, if given half a chance.”
Shrubsole goes on to describe the origins of a tree planting movement in Britain after the war, when the Forestry Commission oversaw reforestation efforts – often commercially, rather than with ecological restoration in mind. There have also been citizen initiatives, such as ‘plant a tree in ‘73’, for those who remember the campaign.
Tree planting remains politically popular, with targets for reforestation included in party manifestos. Actually, delivering new forests in more complicated, and in part depends on clearing land of animals – as described in an earlier article – which is more politically difficult. “Modern industrial agriculture had raised the numbers of sheep and cattle in Britain to unnaturally high levels, meaning over-grazing was destroying huge numbers of saplings,” says Shrubsole.
The BBC Radio 4 programme Can we build a better world with wood? examined the complicated issues involved in changing land use from growing food into growing trees for wood production. Michael Ramage of Cambridge University explains how the development of Cross-Laminated Timber makes it possible to build pretty much any building with wood, while Tim Searchinger of Princeton University argues that turning forests into construction material has a high carbon cost for the planet (probably only 20% of a tree can be used for building when it is cut down, the other 80% eventually returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide).
Nevertheless, peatland restoration and tree planting represent just two of the many possibilities for healing the land after intensive farming. It would reduce carbon, enhance biodiversity, and create a more beautiful world at the same time.
- The series conclude next week with governance, and a case study in farming with Christian principles.
- Header image by Sebastian Unrau/Unsplash
Joy in Enough 