Land could be worth more left to nature than when farmed, study finds
strongwoman who toured music halls in Britain, Europe and Australia in the early part of the 20th century. Or that the oldest university in the world was founded by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, in 859 in Fez. The full list is varied and fabulous, it sings with admiration for so many inspiring women throughout the ages and those who are making history today.
There will be no voting, no ranking, no setting women against one another. Because there is, too often, the narrative of the “one exceptional woman”, the one who somehow stands above every other woman, who is unique and different. Rather, we should celebrate suffragettes Rosa Billinghurst and Annie Kenney and Sophia Duleep Singh alongside Millicent Fawcett and the Pankhursts. And remember Claudette Colvin, who was also arrested in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 for failing to give up her seat on a bus, nine months before Rosa Parks. And remember Cartimandua, the first-century Celtic queen of the Brigantes, alongside Boudicca.
From warrior queens to living legends, the campaign will continue to build. The first 500 nominations received so far will be published on International Women’s Day on 8 March, on panmacmillan.com, with a reading list of recommended biographies, histories, novels, autobiographies, plays published at bookshop.org/shop/katemosse. We hope the list will make you smile, nod your head in recognition, feel amazed and grateful to so many courageous, inventive, clever, brave, principled, entertaining, worldchanging women. We hope it will make you gasp at the omissions and encourage you to add your own nomination. This campaign is about putting all the women back into history, not just a select few. Because only by learning about the whole past, in all its technicolour glory, can we really know where we stand now. To end where we began, with Adrienne Rich: “The words are purposes / The words are maps.”
• Kate Mosse’s novel The City of
Tears is published by Mantle (£20).
Why are women’s achievements so often overlooked or misattributed? Is it accident, design, politics, neglect?
of colour as Northam’s successor would send.
“It is absolutely imperative for us to make good on what we’ve been saying,” she said. “Representation matters and for millions of little girls it’s hard to be what you can’t see. We are yet to have a Black woman lead this nation and we’re yet to have a Black woman lead in a state in this country and, while people have applauded Black women for delivering the White House and helping us win Congress, it’s not enough to thank us.
“You also have to support us when we’re ready to lead, and we are ready. Now is our time. You don’t just need bills and pledges for Black women; we need them written by Black women. And I’m excited that as the next governor, I will be able to continue on the legacy that Governor Northam has started in addressing the inequities throughout all of our systems so we can ensure that Virginia’s future is better than its past.”
John Edwin Mason, who moved to the state in the mid-1990s and teaches history at the University of Virginia, said: “It is a remarkable change. If you had told me that Virginia was going to legalise marijuana and outlaw the death penalty, I would have been very surprised in 1995 and probably would have told you that you had been drinking a little too much to think that that would be possible.
“It was not simply a largely Republican state when it came to electoral politics, but it felt very conservative and it doesn’t quite feel that way on the whole now, although of course in the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative.”
Mason noted that Virginia Republicans seem to be embracing Trumpism,
even after the state comprehensively rejected the president in 2020. Democrats hope other southern states will do likewise.
Mason added: “I think that if you are an optimistic Democratic political operative, you’re probably saying that Virginia is the harbinger of things to come.
“You would point to Georgia which just elected two Democratic senators in a very similar dynamic to the way that our two Democratic senators and Democratic governor have been elected in a state that is very split along regional lines. It is a big change and, of the
states of the old Confederacy, Virginia is by far the bluest.” It was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of young people registered and voting
Larry Sabato
The economic benefits of protecting nature-rich sites such as wetlands and woodlands outweigh the profit that could be made from using the land for resource extraction, according to the largest study yet to look at the value of protecting nature at specific locations.
Scientists analysed 24 sites in six continents and found the asset returns of “ecosystem services” such as carbon storage and flood prevention created by conservation work was, pound for pound, greater than manmade capital created by using the land for activities such as forestry or farming cereals, sugar, tea or cocoa.
The study, which was led by academics at Cambridge University with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), suggests further modifying nature for human use could be costing society more than it benefits it, but these “natural capital” costs are often not taken into account by decision-makers.
It echoes the findings of a landmark review released last month by Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, the Cambridge economist, which warned that the failure of economics to take into account the depletion of the natural world was putting the planet at “extreme risk”.
For the latest study, scientists worked out the annual net value of the chosen sites if they stayed “nature-focused” compared with an “alternative” non-nature focused state over 50 years. They valued each tonne of carbon as worth $31 (£22) to global society, a calculation generally considered to be quite conservative.
More than 70% of these nature-rich sites were found to be worth more in net economic benefits to people if they were left as natural habitats, and all forested sites were worth more with the trees left standing, according to the paper, published in Nature Sustainability. This suggests that even if people were only interested in money – and not nature – conserving these habitats still makes financial sense.
Researchers found a salt marsh called Hesketh Out Marsh on the Ribble estuary in Lancashire, was worth $2,000 (£1,450) a hectare ($800 an acre) in mitigating carbon emissions alone, which was greater than any money that could be made from growing crops or grazing animals on it. Many ecosystem services are still not easily evaluated economically and the results are likely to be conservative estimates, researchers say.
The study’s lead author, Dr Richard Bradbury, head of environmental research at the RSPB and an honorary fellow at Cambridge University, said: “As a conservation scientist at RSPB, you have to be acutely aware of your potential prejudices and be as neutral as possible in the analysis. Yet I was still surprised at how strongly the results favoured conservation and restoration.”
This analysis assumes that carbon is properly accounted for, but even without taking into account the value of carbon, natural sites are still more valuable 42% of the time when left as they are. Dr Kelvin Peh, of Southampton University, a co-author of the study, said: “People mainly exploit nature to derive financial benefits. Yet in almost half of the cases we studied, humaninduced exploitation subtracted rather than increased economic value.”
Converting land for farming is sometimes driven by government subsidies, which encourages the production of goods that do not pay for themselves on the market. This is partly why the UK’s post-Brexit farming policy is moving towards a new environmental land management (ELM) system, which will pay farmers for environmental services their land provides. “The spirit of ELMs in England is spot on,” said Bradbury.
The authors insist that their study should not be used to argue for widespread abandonment of human-dominated landscapes, but said it shows there are lessons to learn about the way we treat natural capital. “We dismiss the flow of services that aren’t easily captured on markets at our peril,” said Bradbury. “As much as I’d like the world to work in a different way, people make economic decisions on the basis of information like this.”
Researchers used a system called TESSA (Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment) to calculate the monetary value of land depending on which ecosystem services it provided. Some sites were as small as 10 hectares in size, others were thousands of hectares. Most of them were forests and wetlands, but also included were habitats such as grasslands and sand dunes.
Dr Alexander Lees, a tropical ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, who was not involved in the study, said the paper’s “robust global analysis” was a reminder of the value of the planet’s remaining wild spaces.
“The policy implications are clear: land ownership is a privilege which comes with great responsibility,” he said. “We should incentivise and reward nature-focused land management with subsidies or payment for ecosystem services whilst penalising those who manage land unsustainably via taxes and regulation.”
Prof Ben Groom, a biodiversity economist at Exeter University who was not involved in the study, said the TESSA sites were quite selective and the results may not be representative of the financial benefits of protecting natural sites more generally. “This is a call for more analysis of such interventions, not a criticism of this study, which does the best possible in a difficult area where there is not much data to speak of,” he said.
Groom added: “The general nature of land-use decisions by large organisations in agriculture and forestry, and the difficulties faced by local communities to realise ecosystem services, are not discussed a great deal. The paper highlights that addressing these missing parts of the puzzle is going to be worth it in terms of local and global ecosystem services.”