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Metrics for effective environmental measures in agriculture
To deliver climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature restoration and high quality food production, the Scottish Government produced their vision for agriculture, along with the next steps, to encourage sustainable and regenerative farming in Scotland.
A programme of work is underway to reform agricultural payments with a greater emphasis placed on delivering environmental outcomes with a proposed structure of four payment tiers tied to a suite of potential measures that will deliver tangible outcomes.
This study identified the most suitable metrics that could be used to monitor the success of the proposed measures in the agricultural reform programme against environmental outcomes. This includes consideration of cost-effectiveness, practicalities and the skills and capabilities of those tasked with monitoring.
Findings:
- Emissions cannot be measured directly, so we suggest using current farm-level tools to assess greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, known as carbon audits. A field level, real time GHG emission model is in development as well as a tool for doing this for ammonia.
- Many metrics depend on direct sampling of soil or biodiversity and can’t be realistically replaced by proxies or existing data. However, well designed sampling programmes can maximise the efficiency of sampling, e.g. sampling for soil carbon, nutrients, pH and eDNA can be done at the same time.
- The outcomes associated with animal health, nutrition and breeding must be largely monitored through proxy metrics. These are relatively easy to measure and provide useful information directly to the land manager.
- A few metrics, such as pesticide usage data or area under permanent habitat, collected as part of the agricultural census, can be derived from existing data.
- Some of the metrics in development could take advantage of samples/data collected at the start of any monitoring programme (e.g. soil eDNA, acoustic monitoring) and others would come online later (e.g. LIDAR-derived hedge data).
- The measure ‘retain traditional cattle’ could not be related to the outcomes.
- Deciding on a suitable suite of metrics to assess the benefits of the Agriculture Reform Programme is only one step as there are issues related to design, sample size and data to be considered.
For further details, please read the report.
If you require the report in an alternative format such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.