Plans announced by the Government for large-scale nature recovery projects could see English farmers being paid to rewild their land.
Under the new plans, landowners and farmers will be able to bid for funding to turn large areas of land over to wildlife restoration, carbon sequestration or flood prevention projects. The scheme is aimed at areas of land between 500 and 5,000 hectares.
This is part of a post-Brexit plan to provide farmers with subsidies in exchange for environmental improvements. Under the EU, farmers were provided with funds based largely on the amount of land they farmed. In a post-Brexit England, the Government instead wants to encourage farmers to introduce practices that improve the environment rather than be rewarded for how much land they work on.
Farmers may also receive payments for "local nature recovery", which will be small-scale actions to help the environment such as tree planting, restoring peatlands or wetlands and leaving space for wildlife habitats. This is part of a broader Government policy aiming to restore up to 300,000 hectares of wildlife habitat by 2042.
Environment Secretary George Eustace told the BBC "What we're moving to is a more generous set of incentives for farmers doing the right thing. We can have both sustainable, profitable food production, and see a recovery for nature as well."
However, some environmental groups have approached the announcements with caution. The finer details of how this will work have not been published and so it is difficult to scrutinise whether the plans will be effective.
Craig Bennett, the Chief Executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said, "The real test of this agricultural transition is not whether it is a little bit better or moderately better than what came before, but whether it will be enough to deliver on [the Government’s targets]. Anything less than that means that this historic opportunity will have been wasted. While we’re hearing the right noises from the Government, the devil will be in the detail and the detail is still not published nearly six years after the EU referendum."
