By Henrietta Appleton, GWCT Policy Officer (England)
We will all remember the focus on the 3Rs at school – reading, writing and arithmetic. Not quite an alliteration! But in the new Green Age, we have a different set of 3Rs to consider – resilience, regenerative farming, and rewilding (including perhaps a fourth, reintroductions). They interconnect in conversations about the future and the challenges that climate change presents for sustainable land management. But what do these oft-used terms mean, and should we be concerned by how they are being applied in policy?
Resilience: the foundation of sustainable land management
I am starting with resilience as this is the force behind the other two in many ways. I find the concept of resilience fascinating, but I question whether it is being used to create ‘ideal’ ecosystems which simply do not exist. Much of our landscape is the evolution of centuries of natural and human disturbances and processes. Creating an environment that is resilient to climate change does not mean, in my opinion, looking backwards; it means looking forward. It means learning from the past, not returning to the past.
What does resilience mean in land management?
The concept of resilience in land management and conservation broadly equates to “the ability of an ecosystem to resist, and recover from, a disturbance,” whether that is due to climate change, natural events, or human activity. This means that an ecosystem needs the capacity to be able to react.
Some would, therefore, argue that, as no one can predict exactly how a disturbance will affect ecological and ecosystem function in a landscape, it is important to preserve all options for addressing that disturbance. I tend to agree, as ecosystems are the result of a range of abiotic and biotic interactions and so are constantly evolving and adapting to the environment around it.
The challenges of restoring ecosystems
This is why I am concerned if the concept of restoring an ecosystem is based on the past, not the future. We cannot expect to re-create ecosystems that have a millennial timeline in a matter of decades. We are only ever going to create ‘novel’ ecosystems.
The concept of novel ecosystems has gained traction over the last 20 years and for those interested in more detail, there is a useful article on the British Ecological Society website. One of the key characteristics of a novel ecosystem is that restoration to a previous condition is difficult due to considerable changes in the biotic and/or abiotic drivers.
Criticism of the novel ecosystem approach
Critics of this concept are concerned that this fails to support the idea that we need to restore and conserve nature to an ecosystem that approximates a previous ecosystem. I tend to disagree with this criticism as I think that restoration (i.e., back to its previous state) in some ecosystems is impossible as irreversible thresholds or tipping points have been reached. This means that we can throw all the money we like at the problem (and waste precious time), and we won’t achieve the desired outcome.
Wildfire and climate resilience
One area of climate change resilience that is the subject of much debate is wildfire. Currently, policy promotes just one approach – rewetting. But this is not proven and, as those who have better experience of the impact of wildfires suggest, it is important that we explore how society can coexist with wildfires and what a policy of rewetting means for that coexistence.
A suggested definition of a fire-resilient landscape is therefore “a socio-ecological system that accepts the presence of fire, whilst preventing significant losses through landscape management, community engagement and effective recovery.”
Proactive approaches to wildfire management
This would engender a more inclusive (to ensure trust in the outcome) and proactive approach to the management of the fuel load, using fire as a natural process (prescribed burning) alongside approaches such as cutting, rewetting and reconfiguring the structure of the vegetation across a landscape to make it more ‘resilient.’
The frustration is that I think all stakeholders agree that avoidance of loss and long-lasting damage because of wildfire is the ultimate aim of climate resilience in our semi-natural habitats. Yet there is no acceptance that there are different ways of approaching this shared outcome.
Regenerative Farming: building resilience in agriculture
Regenerative farming is one approach to making the farming system more sustainable and therefore more resilient to disturbance (climate change). This has gained traction as it is believed that it can help reduce farming’s environmental impact whilst restoring natural processes. There is no formal definition or standard for regenerative farming, unlike the organic system. The focus is on soil health underpinned by five principles:
- Biological diversity (both within the rotation and across the wider farmed landscape)
- Keeping the soil covered (whether with a growing crop or crop residue – or both)
- Keeping living roots in the soil for as much of the year as possible
- Reducing both mechanical and chemical soil disturbance as much as possible
- Integrating organic manures, ideally through grazing livestock.
Soil health and climate resilience
So, let’s relate this back to resilience against climate change. As Joe Stanley wrote in a blog in November 2023, improving soil organic matter (SOM) is one tool in improving soil health and therefore its resilience to climate change. SOM increases a soil’s ability not only to absorb and store water during rainfall events by improving the structure of the soil (its porosity) but also its ability to hold that water during droughts, both of which are forecast to increase due to climate change.
The limitations of soil resilience
Yet this improved resilience will, in some soil types, still be insufficient to cope with the extreme rainfall events that we have witnessed this autumn – and indeed in the last year. Consequently, there is, for some soil types, effectively little resilience left in the system.
We need, therefore, to look for supporting ‘tools’ as this is having an impact on our ability to grow food on these soil types due to impacts on weed control (blackgrass), winter wheat cultivation, and the maize harvest (which is harvested later in autumn and so soil damage in wet conditions can be significant).
The question of food security and land use
Post the Second World War, the solution to this problem involved providing grants for draining heavier land. These have now reached their natural end of life and many need replacing. Contractors will also tell you that, given current rainfall levels, a greater capacity pipework for the main drains are needed too. With no grants available, the payback on renewing drainage systems is unattractive to many farmers at current profit margins.
Critical questions for the future
So, we are faced with several questions: should heavier, poorly draining land continue to be used in food production or should it be repurposed or rewilded? In assessing the resilience of our country to climate change, should we be giving food security greater priority? Or are we happy to repurpose land that has reached its resilience threshold based on nature-based solutions and source our food from elsewhere?
If we outsource our food production, what are the consequences for biodiversity where it is produced? If the Government is serious about food security, it will need to consider such trade-offs.
Rewilding has generated much debate as, like regenerative farming, there is no formal definition. This has resulted in a spectrum of approaches but essentially in the UK it’s the restoration of an ecosystem to a self-sustaining and resilient state through natural processes.
Guiding principles of rewilding
Both the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Rewilding Britain (RB) have set guiding principles in support of their rewilding definitions. Both state that nature leads the restoration, although arguably RB goes further than the IUCN by stating that “It is not geared to reach any human-defined optimal point or end state. It goes where nature takes it.”
In other words, it is not about returning land to a particular point in time (or even necessarily conserving what we have now); instead, it is letting nature develop within our evolving climatic and ecological framework.
The misleading "re" in rewilding
This is where the term rewilding is confusing as the ‘re’ bit suggests the return to an ecosystem related to a specific point in time and therefore is arguably akin to the current approach of ecological restoration. What rewilding actually does is seek to restore ecosystem processes and dynamics through reduced human influences on ecosystems.
The creation of novel ecosystems
However, and this to me is crucial, the current natural components might not be the original ones, and this therefore could have a bearing on the outcomes. Hence the creation of what are termed novel ecosystems. It also begs the question how this version of rewilding differs from restoration as it suggests that natural assets present at the current time have been affected by outside environmental pressures rather than being seen as original ‘pristine’ assets.
Reduced human influence in rewilding
Also crucial in my mind is the reduced human influence. Some advocate ‘land abandonment’ whilst others recognise that some intervention is necessary for nature to heal itself. Sandom et al (2018) considered that rewilding took the form of two related approaches - active and passive.
Active rewilding involved more management/intervention such as habitat restoration and reintroductions/translocations to restore degraded ecological processes. Passive rewilding involved the repurposing of land with minimal or no management, although some management is usually required at an early stage to set the ecosystem off on its desired trajectory. Consequently, many rewilding projects migrate from active to passive.
The role of management in rewilding
My concern is that, as our landscape is no longer wild given centuries of human involvement and management (see the blog on “Are we one of the most nature-depleted countries?” for more on this), removing certain interventions is going to result in habitat change over time, simply through natural plant succession.
In addition, as GWCT research can demonstrate, management is key to our ability to stack positive outcomes on a piece of land (biodiversity, carbon storage, etc.). This is important given the future need for “multi-functional land use” in our tiny, densely populated island.
Balancing nature recovery with management
But as one of the demands is nature recovery, there is undoubtedly a role for giving over parts of a farm and landscape to nature. My contention is that those ‘re-natured’ areas need as much effective management as does food production in a field and that rewilding is not necessarily the answer to the need for multiple positive outcomes in the farmed landscape.
We discussed rewilding in the upland context in our Sustaining Ecosystems – English Grouse Moors and concluded that it is unproven to deliver the range of ecosystem services that the managed approach based on economic land uses currently yields. It would seem that there is a similar situation in the lowland farmed landscape.
Despite my reservations about rewilding, I do believe it has a role to play in conservation. Just not the dominant one. And that brings me back to the subject of resilience and the need to pick up on a point I made in the third paragraph. Ecosystems need the capacity to be able to react and as no one can predict exactly how a disturbance will affect function, all ‘tools’ need to be available.
Conclusion: policy for resilience and sustainability
My lesson from the 3Rs therefore is that policy needs to support all approaches within our land management system that aim for resilience and sustainability. If we choose to limit the options available for managing our land, then we could generate unforeseen consequences and compromise the resilience of our ecosystems in the face of climate change.
Ultimately, we need to accept that our vision of our landscape may not be the one that develops over time.
(Please note: These monthly musings are intended as interest pieces and to provoke thought. I do not pretend to have deep knowledge about the subjects I am covering or indeed to be comprehensive in my coverage. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy researching and writing them.)