BRX0163

Written evidence submitted by the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership and the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership

Agriculture, food and drink forms a significant part of the economy in Cornwall, estimated at around 18% of county GDP. Added to the tourism industry this amounts to just less than half of total GDP for the whole of the county. Most tourism is generated via the attractiveness of coast and countryside. Therefore it is critical that we achieve a system post Brexit, which supports our farming economy but also, conserves and enhances the landscape and its natural and cultural environment. Cornwall is clear through its Environmental Growth Strategy that we must seek to positively grow the environment. I.e. Simple conservation is not enough. Give the current sharp declines in biodiversity; any post Brexit action to manage the natural environment must seek not only to halt, but also to reverse these declines.

1) What are the implications for UK biodiversity of leaving the EU, in particular the Common Agricultural Policy?

Monitoring carried out by the Cornwall AONB Unit shows that in the protected landscape in Cornwall (which covers 28% of Cornwall), 49% of the total area of the AONB was covered by a Stewardship scheme, 51% of which was Entry Level, 34% was entry level plus higher level and then 15% higher level or in an organic scheme. Area of land in a scheme had increased significantly since 2009, by a staggering 53%. Total investment of those schemes in 2013 within the Cornwall AONB was nearly £4M (£3,813,016).

In addition, the Cornwall AONB analysis shows a huge fall in small farms between 2009 and 2013 with farms <5ha declining by 95% with an consequent increase in farms of >100ha. This is indicative of farm intensification and is a picture that we see across Cornwall as a whole.

Despite investment in agri-schemes in Cornwall species populations are still declining. In a 2014 study, the charity Buglife estimated that Cornwall has lost over 46% of its bee population since 1950.

It is clear that the current agri-schemes in Cornwall either ineffective and/ or the levels of investment and activity are not enough to make a difference. The answer is probably both. If we lose farm agri-environment payments the expectation is that we will see sharper falls in species due to a lack of activity for wildlife on farms coupled with an increased intensification of agriculture across the board in Cornwall.

We need to find an investment mechanism which supports a range of benefits, which can conserve and enhance species, landscapes, the historic environment and access whilst providing multiple benefits e.g. flood control, carbon storage, food production etc. The investment needs to be enough to maintain these services and also grow the natural environment in ways which are much more sustainable and to significantly increase biodiversity.

An approach based on Natural Capital and ecosystem goods and services, building upon the good work carried out by the Natural Capital Committee would be a useful approach with the clear outcome of achieving high levels of ‘environmental growth’. In the future we will see farmers less as food producers and more of providers of a range of benefits to humans and in doing so will better manage ecosystems for wildlife.

Brexit also poses a risk to the integrity of our European Sites system. Special Areas of Conservation such as the Fal and Helford Estuaries in Cornwall, Special Protection Areas and Ramsar sites designations are reflective of areas of high conservation value. Ensuring their ongoing protection post brexit is vital in order to maintain islands of quality habitat from which to restore natural ecosystems across wider areas consistent with the approach suggested by Sir John Lawton of bigger, better and more joined up. Cornwall would have an ambition to increase the quality of our natural capital and biodiversity resource across the whole of Cornwall, and in doing so achieve  greater enhancement of our protected areas such as SSSIs, our AONBs and SACs.

In addition there are numerous pieces of UK legislation, guidance and initiatives that seek to implement EU directives e.g The Climate Change Act, Environmental Impact Regulations, Bathing Water Regulations, Nitrate Vulnerable Zones, Fisheries Act Catchment Management Plans, Catchment Sensitive Farming, The Flood and Water Management Act. It is critical that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater and continue to show leadership on the world stage in protecting our environment for future generations.

2) To what extent do initiatives to support farm biodiversity in the UK depend upon CAP-related payments?

Most agricultural based conservation initiatives in the UK are project funded, some through the Heritage Lottery Fund or other such national funding programmes, as well as European Funding programmes such as LIFE or Interreg. In addition Cornwall currently benefits massively from the European Structural Investment funds. The loss of these EU funding streams post Brexit is another major threat to conservation initiatives. Most of these funds are seeking good value/ value for money and most projects are required to demonstrate significant levels of match funding in order to be successful in their bid. The agri environment schemes are a very useful source of match funding against funds such as Heritage Lottery. Losing one of these mainstays of match funding to project income poses a serious difficulty in the successful funding of agricultural conservation projects.

3) What risk and opportunities could developing our own agri-environment (AE) policy and funding present?

Risks

The importance of nature/ the environment is consistently and massively overlooked (by all governments) when faced with competing priorities such as health and social care. This could result in lower levels of investment.

Lower levels of investment than the EU schemes could result in smaller areas being covered by schemes and declines in wildlife to an even greater extent.

The scheme may be more competitive and less easy to achieve on smaller farms, creating a bias to the larger agri businesses/ companies.

Lack of support for small farmers results in continued conversion of smaller farms (which are usually more biodiverse) into amalgamated agri-businesses (which are usually less biodiverse, more chemical inputs etc.)

Schemes have been too complicated and difficult to administer for the smaller farmer.

Lack of resources to monitor the schemes could lead to abuse and difficulties in measuring scheme success.

Too much of a focus on biodiversity could result in a lack of investment in other aspects of the environment e.g. landscape, heritage and access and also vital ecosystem services such as carbon capture.

In order to achieve environmental growth and halt, then reverse declines in biodiversity we must do more than was being done under CAP. The biggest risk is that we will do less.

We should be able to set ourselves higher standards and targets with what we’d like to achieve from post-brexit investment into the natural environment, the risk is that it would be less ambitious rather than more.

A lack of information on support and mixed confused messages to farmers could result in low uptake

Opportunities

We can use a revised support package to help shift the way the natural environment is viewed, from a nice to do, to a must do and embed this thinking across government and the business sector.

There is a key opportunity to work across government to embed the natural environment across government and by investing in nature to save a heap of cash in other areas. Health is a great example since if we properly invested in access to a high quality environment; research shows us that we would have a healthier (less NHS reliant) population.

There is an opportunity to take a strategic look at the different types of ‘natural capital’ across the UK and tailor a support scheme, which invests in the services that is provided by individual areas. This means we can play to an area’s strengths. For example, the uplands are terrible places to produce food and the economics are always marginal. But they are great at storing carbon and controlling water runoff. If we developed appropriate investment mechanisms for the uplands, we could support businesses as well as investing to meet our climate change targets and prevent expensive flooding incidents, as well as managing the land in a way which is far more consistent with biodiversity objectives.

It would be great to see a UK agricultural investment to replace CAP, which was decoupled from production, was truly focused on the environment and open to all landowners.

There is a big opportunity to involve the private sector more in investing in the natural environment by taking ecosystems services approach. Consistent with the approach currently being outlined for Defra’s 25 year Environment Plan we can look at developing private sector investment mechanisms which recognise the value of ecosystem services (and the risks to our wider economy of taking a business as usual approach to our critical natural capital that provides them). The goal would be to integrate investment into the natural world within our mainstream economic system.

A UK derived scheme would not be bound by EU standard and regulation. This poses a risk but also an opportunity in that we should be able to provide a more flexible scheme, able to better adapt to local nuances and conditions. Conversely there is a risk that a UK scheme would not employ such high standards as an EU wide scheme or vice versa.

4) How should future support for UK agriculture be structured in order to ensure there are incentives for environmentally friendly land management?

Support should be refocused to achieve positive and far reaching environmental outcomes from all landowners. The government needs to make significant investment of public funds into environmental management, over and above investments which were being made via CAP. Future incentives need to take an approach which recognises the ecosystem services provided to people and the cost benefits that these services provide, funding should therefore be able to be secured from multiple treasury sources.

Improved environmental management could be achieved through tax incentives and polluter pays approaches, internalising costs associated with environmental degradation. This begins with a clear recognition of those impacts/ costs which are externalised at the moment.

There is a need to development investment mechanisms in order to support land management for multiple benefits. Voluntary approaches may not come forward quickly enough to reverse current trends in biodiversity with the speed that we need them to be reversed. There is a need to recognise that the last major piece of biodiversity legislation in the UK was the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. Updated legislation is necessary immediately to prevent catastrophic losses of biodiversity which will have a serious and permanent impact on our economy and quality of life.

Any new support scheme to replace CAP should consider farm profitability the recognition that yields/ profitability may decrease if land is being managed for biodiversity and/ or ecosystem services. There is an opportunity to roll what is now Pillar 1 and 2 together to provide effective local support  (either on individual farms or in local landscape areas) in terms of infrastructure, agri-tech, skills and payments for environmental management that will maintain profitability and support that business.

In addition, the UK could consider the extent to which the UK wishes to be self-sustaining in terms of food production. This would be helpful in terms of food security but also in terms of food miles and environmental sustainability.

5) How should future UK agri-environment support be administered, and what outcomes should it focus on?

The new system should set a basic standard for the management of landholdings, which must be met to be eligible for support. This should aim to significantly improve management of the environment across the board, over and above the outcomes of the previous basic payment and before any support is offered. This would mitigate the significant risk that funding into any new scheme is not likely to be enough.

The support needs to focus on multiple benefits with a payment scale which recognises how many benefits a land manager can deliver. This needs to be based on the suite of ecosystem goods and services identified by the National Ecosystems Assessment. This would be usefully targeted by a strategic geographical assessment of which ecosystem services are best delivered by which landscapes across the UK.

Reversing losses of biodiversity and achieving significant growth in the environment should be a cross cutting and priority aim of the support.

Administration and the applications process should be as simple as possible. Conservation agencies should be adequately resourced to implement and deliver the support locally. Monitoring is a critical element that must be properly resourced.

6) What are the positive/ negatives of current schemes which should be retained/ avoided

Negatives

• Too inflexible to properly take account of local circumstances.
• Not monitored effectively, not able to say if they were successful, apart from in certain schemes (e.g. farmland bird schemes closely monitored by RSPB volunteers)
• No clear targets outcomes set,
• No idea of how the farmer contributes to the wider effort for the whole,
• Focuses on biodiversity outcomes, not multiple benefits,
• Encourages large agri business to the detriment of the smaller farmer

Positives

• Brings together conservation agencies and land managers, enabling conversations to be had.
• A decent if inflexible range of options
• Encouraged farmers to seek advice and consider the environment

7) What are the future prospects and challenges for future environmental stewardship in devolved administrations?

The major challenge for a devolved administration would be resources and economies of scale. Devolved schemes would need to be adequately resourced in terms of administration. It would be useful if UK wide support could set clear ambitious and high level objectives for achieving environmental growth, which could be shared by devolved schemes, therefore facilitating joint reporting across the UK.

However there would be also be positives to devolved schemes in that schemes could be targeted more locally and be managed more as a conversation between local agencies and local landowners, potentially to achieve greater benefits. There would also be the potential to achieve better monitoring from an improved scheme and apply more local data to achieve sharper targeting.

8) How much divergence in policy between the nationals of the UK is likely

Not sure

How can divergence be managed

See answer to 7 above.

9)         What are the future risks and opportunities to innovative land management practices such as managed rewilding

There are some major benefits to a rewilding approach. Where rewilding has taken place it has proved to be very successful in the quick establishment of functioning ecosystems capable of supporting healthy wildlife populations, particularly where keystone species can be introduced. Rewilding certain areas would have major gains for a number of major ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, wildlife, water quality and flood control.

There could also be some service disbenefits e.g. rewilded areas may be less accessible, so some of the cultural services such as tourism, health and recreation may be reduced.

The major risk to any rewilding scheme is that the payments would not be economic against other land uses such as food production/ shooting. A strategic geographical approach should be taken to the targeting of areas for rewilding using carbon storage, water quality and control and ecosystem restoration as key outcomes.

10)     What role can rewilding play in conservation and restoration of habitat and wildlife

See above under 9

11)     What evidence is there to support the incentivising of such schemes in any new land management policies

The Natural Environment White Paper, A Natural Choice made it clear that a step change is needed in how e approach the stewardship of our environment. Properly incentivised schemes which have the highest uptake and are achieving the maximum benefits are critical to this.

The national ecosystems assessment provides strong evidence as to the relationship between our economy and the services provided by nature. The Natural Capital Committee has made it clear that England's natural environment is in decline and its deterioration is harming the economy.

The 3RD report in 2015 from the Natural Capital Committee stated clearly that the elements of the natural environment which provide valuable goods and services to people - like clean air, clean water, food and recreation - are in long-term decline and that pressures will rise with population growth. It called for a 25-year investment plan and stressed that measures like investing in improved air quality and greener cities would bring economic benefits. The committee also advised that creating hundreds of thousands of hectares of woodland and wetlands would lead to multi-million pound benefits, including avoiding flooding and improving health.

It is also worth restating the headlines in the 2015 The State of Nature Report from the RSPB. This provides unequivocal evidence to support an immediate and significant investment in biodiversity backed by primary legislation.

“We have quantitative assessments of the population or distribution trends of 3,148 species. Of these, 60% of species have declined over the last 50 years and 31% have declined strongly.

Half of the species assessed have shown strong changes in abundance or distribution, indicating that recent environmental changes are having a dramatic impact on the nature of the UK’s land and seas. There is also evidence to suggest that species with specific habitat requirements are faring worse than generalist species that are better able to adapt to a changing environment.

A new Watchlist Indicator has been developed to measure how conservation priority species are faring, based on 155 species for which we have suitable data. This group contains many of our most threatened and vulnerable species, and the indicator shows that their overall numbers have declined by 77% in the last 40 years, with little sign of recovery.

Of more than 6,000 species that have been assessed using modern Red List criteria, more than one in ten are thought to be under threat of extinction in the UK. A further 885 species are listed as threatened using older Red List criteria or alternative methods to classify threat.

Response produced by Colette Beckham, Cornwall AONB partnership Manager with input from the Local Nature Partnership Board and Cornwall Council Strategic Environment Service. 

September 2016