Call to pay farmers for ‘rewilding’ their land

LANDOWNERS should be able to claim payments for “rewilding” schemes under post-Brexit farming policy, environmentalists have urged.

The Government has plans for a system of “public money for public goods”, paying farmers and landowners for delivering benefits such as wildlife habitat, flood prevention, healthy soils and carbon storage on their land.

Under plans in legislation going through Parliament, the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme would replace the EU subsidies which are mostly paid for the amount of land farmed.

Environmental group Rewilding Britain wants to see rewilding – the large-scale restoration of landscapes, with natural processes and even missing species such as beavers reinstated – as an option in the ELM scheme.

The organisation said rewilding, which is becoming more popular among landowners, can deliver “public goods”, such as a boost to wildlife, water quality and carbon storage, at scale, efficiently and effectively.

It can also help farmers diversify their income into areas including “glamping” and eco-tourism to make their businesses more resilient and less reliant on subsidies, Rewilding Britain director Professor Alastair Driver said.

Prof Driver said: “The public goods that these projects are delivering, the reduced flood risk, the improved water quality, the improved carbon sequestration, the biodiversity, the health and wellbeing benefits, they are significant. And the bigger the scale you are operating at the more likely you are to make a difference.”

He said rewilding would fit in the top tier of the ELM scheme, which focuses on landscape-scale projects for changing land use, and said it was a “genuine serious option” for managing land alongside regenerative or intensive farming.

It should be explicitly mentioned as an option in the ELM scheme, he said, adding: “It’s time we got over this false hurdle of it being something scary.”

He said if it were not mentioned, elements of rewilding such as large-scale tree-planting and peat bog restoration would still take place, but it made sense to do it all as a coordinated project.

In answer to critics of rewilding who are concerned it turns land from productive farming to wilderness, he said rewilded land was still productive and accounted for less than 1% of land in Britain. Rewilding Britain wants to see that increase to 5% by 2100.