A new report commissioned by The Widlife Trusts, RSPB and National Trust, highlights the scale of investment now needed to boost nature-friendly farming to ensure we meet UK climate and nature targets, writes Erin McDaid of the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. The report — A Scale of Need — calls for an increase in investment in the nature-friendly farming budget to £5.9billion per annum across the UK.
This is the level deemed essential to deliver on legally binding nature and climate targets whilst strengthening the resilience of the UK farming industry. The current total agricultural budget stands at £3.5 billion — a figure unchanged in over a decade.
Currently around 20 to 25% is spent on agri-environment schemes designed to benefit nature. The figures in the report include, for the first time, analysis of different types of farm across the UK and variations in the costs of nature restoration in different sectors and across varying sizes of farm. Like many discussions, debate around issues linked to farming, food production and the need to farm in more nature-friendly ways can be polarised — but with climate change and nature loss posing the biggest threats to UK food security it is clear that attempts to pit investment in nature versus investment focused purely on production in a binary way are ill-informed and counterproductive.
The impact on food production as a result of increasingly severe and frequent flooding is clear for all to see. We are calling on the n.