Managing flood risk and improving water quality are among the “public goods” farmers could be paid to deliver in future.

How might our farmers adapt to a public money for public goods regime?

It is clear that our rich and diverse environment is not only important for our own leisure and recreation but is also increasingly recognised as making an essential contribution to society’s health and wellbeing. As a nation we also trade on the high quality of Scotland’s environment in order to attract tourists and sell products from our farming, forestry and fishing industries.

So maintaining, and where necessary improving, the health of our environment is therefore of fundamental importance to achieving a healthy, sustainable Scotland.

But while much of our environment is of relatively good quality, there are still challenges to be addressed.

Ongoing climate change is having an increasingly adverse economic impact on all levels of society, as evidenced by regular floods in towns and villages and storm damage to farmland and forests. Improving water quality, managing flood risk, protecting soils and reversing biodiversity decline are other key areas where improvements are required.

For all these challenges wider society is looking for changes in land and water management to help deliver the improvements. And of course, we cannot divorce what happens in the water environment from what happens on land. Both are inextricably linked.

So what type of public goods can farmers across Scotland help provide?

On our upland farms there is plenty of scope to restore degraded peatlands in the hills and establish more woodland at lower levels. Healthy peatlands lock up carbon while absorbing and storing more. They can also act as giant sponges, holding back water during periods of high rainfall. Restoring degraded peatlands by re-vegetating bare areas and blocking ditches to re-wet the peat also stops the processes causing greenhouse gas emissions like methane.

Establishing more woodland on the lower parts of our upland farms would make more shelter available to livestock exposed to increasing extreme weather events. But it would also provide more wildlife habitats and, if trees are planted in the right places, also help reduce downstream flooding by holding back the water from saturated moorlands.

The challenge on our lowland farms is to maintain profitable food production while increasing the diversity of habitats like woodlands, unmanaged field margins, wetlands and wooded riversides. These would benefit farmland biodiversity and help capture nutrients and soil escaping from fields into watercourses. Combining some of these elements with recreating meanders on rivers, establishing field storage ponds to retain flood water, and managing those fields to reduce soil and water run-off would also provide ways of mitigating flood events by slowing the flow of water through the lowlands.

It is now being recognised that any public funding that goes to land managers in the future is going to have to be argued for – and justified – against other calls on funding such as education.

In order to make such arguments, it will be important that the public goods being delivered can be assessed in a costeffective and transparent way.

A two-day conference in Edinburgh later this month will help inform the debate about how best to reward farmers, foresters and other land managers for delivering public goods from their land management practices. In particular it will provide a forum to help develop thinking of practical implementation on the ground and what that means for policy development.