There are still many unknowns about what will be required of farmers under an agricultural bill passed by the Scottish government in June, including on the incentives for woodland creation and peatland restoration, a trade body representative told a webinar on Wednesday.

Farmers are wondering what the new agri-environment scheme is going to look like, and how a biodiversity audit and app will work, said Sarah Cowie, senior policy manager at the National Farmers Union Scotland, during a webinar hosted by Scotland Policy Conferences.

“In our submission to the consultation on Scotland’s biodiversity strategy last December, we said that the actions in the delivery plan were so high level that it was almost impossible for our members to understand how it would affect them,” said Cowie

“Now, almost a year later, we don’t seem to have much more in terms of what that’s going to look like, what the detail is going to be, who’s going to deliver on these things, and where the money is going to come from.”

The Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill passed on June 18, 2024.

The legislation aims to help farmers produce food more sustainably, support their key role in climate mitigation and nature restoration, and will create a framework of payments that is responsive to the sector’s needs and promotes low-carbon approaches.

Now the bill has passed, Scottish ministers must prepare a five-year Rural Support Plan, with details of farming, forestry, and rural development support, with the framework to be brought into law by secondary legislation.

Policymakers must ensure that food production is an integral part of any policies around biodiversity in nature, as the two “go hand-in-hand” and “policies need to be deliberately designed to enable this”, said Cowie.

“We need the critical mass of farming in key agricultural areas to continue. This is vital for food production, it’s vital for the rural economy, and it’s vital for biodiversity,” she told the webinar.

Scotland cannot deliver on its nature ambitions – to have restored and regenerated biodiversity across its land, freshwater, and seas by 2045 – without the support of farmers, she said.

Land use contributes about 50% of Scotland’s net greenhouse gas emissions, largely driven by agricultural practices and degraded peatland.

The industry requires more than just financial support to restore biodiversity – it also needs training on new approaches and technologies, plus peer-to-peer knowledge exchange – to inspire land managers to make the necessary changes, she said.

“We need a whole-scale narrative shift away from this perception that farmers aren’t interested, or they don’t do anything for biodiversity, as for many caring for their land is a part of their way of life.”

Scotland is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, according to the Biodiversity Intactness Index 2023, with average species abundance having declined by about 15% in the country since 1994, and about one in nine of its species currently at risk of national extinction, the webinar heard.

Intensification of agriculture following the industrial revolution and two world wars has been a key driver of this biodiversity loss, but that isn’t to say that the situation can’t be turned around with the right policies and conservation efforts, said Paul Walton, head of habitat and species at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland.

NATURE INITIATIVES

Scotland’s £65 million Nature Restoration Fund is a key lever in reducing biodiversity decline and restoring ecosystems in Scotland, said Francesca Osowska, CEO of NatureScot, Scotland’s nature agency, also on the webinar.

A project to regenerate a flood plain in Angus and to reduce downstream flood risk has been funded by the fund, she said, as has the Scottish Invasive Species Initiative, which aims to reduce invasive species such as giant hogweed, Himalayan Balsam, and mink.

Another nature-positive programme is Species on the Edge, which is acting to reverse decline of 37 of the most threatened species found along Scotland’s coasts and islands, and the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund, which acts on voluntary contributions from marine developers, typically offshore renewables, to support nature restoration in the marine environment such as seagrass planting, she said.

Also flagged was the Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS), which has surpassed £4 mln of funding, and aims to develop business cases for private or blended finance to support nature restoration in Scotland.

The critical role of using private sector capital to accelerate nature restoration in Scotland was highlighted by several webinar speakers, with one farmer and landowner citing a peatland restoration example funded by SSE Renewables.

The SSE subsidiary funded the restoration of 160 hectares of peatland on the Armadale Farm in southern Scotland earlier this year, with a further 905 hectares to be restored via the Flow Country Green Finance Initiative, said farm owner Joyce Campbell.

Armadale Farm is engaged on a number of regenerative agriculture initiatives, including planting hedgerows and restoring peatland, said Campbell, adding that more needs to be done to engage and educate farmers about the benefits of nature restoration.

NATURAL CAPITAL

Scottish landowners are able to earn revenue through generating carbon credits under the UK’s Woodland Carbon Code or Peatland Carbon Code, with the UK peatland restoration market growing fast despite needing clearer parameters in the way of more regular verifications and better reporting guidelines.

An estimated 80% of UK peatlands are in a modified or damaged state, and emit more carbon than sequestered by the country’s forests every year.

The emerging market for voluntary biodiversity credits is also available to Scottish landowners able to evidence an improvement in biodiversity across a stretch of land.

However, the voluntary biodiversity market is still in its early stages, with a lack of sufficient demand for the units yet to arise and methodologies still in various stages of development.

Total investments in the natural capital asset class could rise to $1 trillion or more over the next two decades, on the back of revenues from outputs including biodiversity markets, investor New Forests has said.

By Bryony Collins – bryony@carbon-pulse.com

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