We need to resolve land use conflicts

Scotland is demanding so many uses from its land that conflicts are inevitable. We are about to transition from the third to fourth Land Use Strategy, but the radical changes needed to resolve the conflicts have not materialised in policy or practice. This think piece offers a means of trying to resolve the conflicts.

Pressing issues

The Scottish Government has declared a climate and nature crisis.  Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses now make up over 50% of Scotland’s net emissions (or 40% of gross emissions). There is no pathway to net zero without addressing these emissions, which have flat-lined for the last 30 years. We need to produce food for home consumption and for export where markets are available. Yet, even this simple premise is in conflict with the rising demand for cereal crops to produce alcoholic beverages for human consumption, and of course one of our major international exports. Also, in conflict for some of Scotland’s farmland is the rising demand for houses around major towns and cities. This is essentially ‘sealing the ground surface’ resulting in greater runoff from the land which, coupled with the increased storminess of our weather and changing climate, is increasing flood risk on farmland and in settlements. More tree planting in the right place with the most appropriate species and better management would benefit landscape diversity, biodiversity and flood reduction and water availability, and supply home grown timber to reduce our imports and provide a steady supply to the market.  But this is not happening.  Furthermore, the country needs to support renewable energy installations, using our water and wind resources, but both types have divided public opinion and market forces are ensuring that any land taken out of agriculture will have contestable effects on biodiversity and landscape quality.

And for farmers, land owners and managers, there is the added frustration of the barriers between policy and making things happen on the ground. Many complain, with reason, that there is too little support for innovation, knowledge transfer and collaborative efforts (e.g. Farmer Clusters in the south); or for support for income foregone during transition to new land use; or for incentivising routes to markets, more flexible land tenure, and incentivising (rather than further taxing of) business succession.  The regulatory and data burdens on businesses are hefty, and deter innovation.

If Scotland is to halt the decline in biodiversity and tackle the climate emergency  it needs radical but equitable solutions.

General context: conflict on Scotland’s land use

Everyone has an opinion about the countryside and how it should be used, whether they live in urban or in rural areas. After all, 98% of Scotland is classed as rural, so all of us need it for something. The problem is there are so very many things we need the rural landscape for.

For instance, food security is an increasing priority for the limited amount of very productive land that we have in the lowlands of Scotland, but how that food is produced can affect our water quality, wildlife or the nation’s carbon footprint. In the lowlands, food producers need to strike a good balance between maximising yields and increasing food security, while recognising they must minimise the environmental impacts and build resilience to climate risks for their business and wider society. The uplands produce food as well, but land uses here, and associated benefits are exceptionally varied and hotly debated! Hills and moorland not only support farming, forestry and renewable energy production, but  if imaginatively managed offer protection against flooding, maintain nature, and support a wide range of country sports,  recreational and tourist activities.

Scotland’s rural areas face major social and economic challenges – to name a few, limited economic regeneration and employment opportunities, a lack of sufficient affordable housing, high energy costs for business and homes, poor transport infrastructure and an ageing population as the young emigrate and older people need increased health and social care services.

Successfully addressing any one of the economic, environmental or social challenges facing Scotland’s rural areas demands the right things happening, at the right time, in the right places, at the right scale. However, the decisions and actions taken to address any one of these issues can also have the potential to complement or conflict with decisions and actions taken to address each or all of the other concerns.

Current patterns of land use reflect the post-war consensus on productivity and yield, from grouse moors to barley and everything in between. It is even reflected in urban planning and design in areas zoned for specific uses. This policy and practice assumes a mainly stable and predictable climate. The current compartmentalised use of land, mainly for single benefits or purpose, is vulnerable to an array of climate risks and is a net source of greenhouse gas emissions. Now that climate is both warming and becoming more chaotic, we must review policy and practice so that it is fit for the present and future.

Climate action for net zero is viewed through the national greenhouse gas inventory. For land use, this comprises agriculture, forestry, grassland, cropland, wetland, and settlements, with little or no mixing between them. This both reflects and reinforces the post-war settlement on what land is for, and constrains the multiple benefits needed from land at fine scales to manage multiple and cascading risks in a more volatile climate. Today, this lens limits our imagination, vision and ambition for what land use is for, the distribution of public and private goods and associated benefits, burdens and risk that come with those choices.

Why are these conflicts on Scotland’s land use occurring?

Current Scottish Government policy recognises the need for multiple benefits, but the mechanisms and financial instruments mean that action on the ground is not delivering this. This is made worse by the dominance of economic growth as the ruling mantra without recognising that other aspects, particularly social wellbeing in all of its many and varied elements and the natural environment are all pressing needs that require action and resources. This is epitomised in the outcome about the future of farm support with a production emphasis on the four tier system in the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024.

Sector lobbyists remain extremely powerful. The advocates of different priorities are passionate and their arguments about how our land should be used are keenly honed. But the reality is that there is only so much land available, and using it solely for one purpose imposes burdens and risk on others.

An inherent reason for the current im passe is that the market should decide. But which market and who controls that market? This is becoming more complex as new actors are becoming involved, alongside the traditional intergenerational farmers and estate owners, hedge funds and insurance companies, bringing new motives into the fray. This has made it all the more difficult to resolve conflicts.

Attempts to resolve these conflicts through ‘top-down’ locational strategies for public goods have invariably fallen foul of competing market and associated private interests. The changing nature of risk in a warming and more chaotic climate is an opportunity to strike a better balance between these interests through the distribution of benefits and burdens, including the costs of losses associated with increasing climate risks.

Towards a framework for resolution

Achieving multiple benefits from our land is therefore not simply a nice thing to do, it is essential to address effectively all the economic, environmental and social challenges that we face.

The Climate Change Committee’s carbon budgets outline economically feasible pathways to net zero, and these are implemented by the four governments of the UK. The 7th carbon budget published in February 2025 covers 2037-2042, so getting to the sharp end of Scotland’s target to be net zero by 2045. Providing for predicted energy demands places huge demands on the land. The main sources of demand are to electrify transport, renewable heating in buildings and novel sources including data storage. Renewable sources have a large footprint on the land and sea. In addition, for those sectors that are hard to decarbonise, there is increasing emphasis on measures to remove greenhouse gases including in biological systems, such as woodlands and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Restoring nature, including peatlands, is also important to prevent losses of greenhouse gases from those stores. These biological removals also need to be as resilient as they can be to climate and other risks. But there will be some losses, and there is a need to do more to allow for losses.

If they are designed and managed well, an additional benefit of biological removals is that they can provide ecosystem services – multiple benefits – that help society to reduce vulnerability to a warming and more chaotic climate.

Indeed, one argument might be to manage land primarily for resilience, with everything else (including carbon) as a co-benefit and with the ‘maximum sustainable yield’ measured over full rotations and allowing for losses due to climate impacts. This would provide for social, economic and environmental resilience including food security and water security. Demand may need to be managed downward to sit within sustainable yield, and, again, these choices can be meditated through the distribution of benefits, burdens and risk.

For rural land use, the sea change challenge came about following the recommendation in RSE’s report Inquiry into the future of the hills and Islands of Scotland which, inter alia,  proposed that

“a Strategic Land Use Policy Framework is developed by the Scottish Government in order to provide a more integrated and coordinated basis for action and to reduce the level of land use conflicts which do and will continue to occur. A Land Stewardship Proofing Test should also be developed and applied to ensure that the maximum public benefits are gained from land use decisions.”

As a result, and with lobbying by many parties, the Section 57 of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 placed a duty on the Scottish Government to produce a land use strategy and to revise it every 5 years. Scotland’s first Land Use Strategy was published in 2011. It emphasised multiple benefits to achieve sustainability of the economy, environment and communities, and offered both a guide to public sector policy making and an Action Plan for taking the Strategy forward. Since then, a series of pilot tests have been run to produce Regional Land Use Strategies and Plans, initially in the Borders and Grampian, and later in other areas, such as recently in the South of Scotland.

It is clear that much more needs to be done, especially as climate warms and becomes more chaotic, and the distribution of benefits, burdens and risk shifts. Many of the tools needed to address these competing interests are available. The fourth Land Use Strategy is an opportunity to give them much greater effect.

Land managers play an essential role in helping deliver multiple benefits, but they need to be provided with much more help and advice about delivering those benefits in practice.

Achieving multiple benefits from the land requires much more than tweaking existing land use systems. In many cases, it requires major changes and the establishment of new systems which at least narrow existing divisions, such as the present divide between farming and forestry, and between traditionally leaving vegetable cropping soils exposed in the winter compared with continuous cover cropping regimes.

Scientists, industry groups and campaigners need to think hard about the way they work and communicate with each other. Too often, progress, trust and commitment can be hampered because one side doesn’t understand the way the other thinks, speaks or is driven. Whether we are policy specialists or land managers or the public – we need combined understanding and enthusiasm if we are to achieve the major changes in land use that are essential.

How does farmland need to change?

Let us look at one role of farmland. In addition to providing healthy food for people, it has a vital role in tackling flooding, addressing climate change and improving biodiversity. However, to do so effectively our farming systems need to change significantly. For years, intensive arable and dairy farming have been in the lowlands, whilst the uplands have been home to over 6 million sheep, able to withstand the tough climate. These systems evolved to help feed a growing population; they now face challenges. Maximising productivity and yield in a stable climate is not the same as securing yield in a warming and more chaotic climate. Common to both are concerns about water quality and flooding, as well as storms, pests, pathogens and disease. The way farmland is managed can have important implications for the scale and severity of flooding experienced by communities alongside water courses.

In what ways do farming systems need to change?

First, more investment will be needed to help upland owners to restore degraded peatlands in the hills and establish more woodland at lower levels and maintain it in good condition for timber and non-timber benefits, including food from the understory.

Peat soils in Scotland contain almost 25 times as much carbon as all other plant life in the UK. The carbon stored in Scottish soils, especially in peat and peaty soil, is equivalent to over 180 years of our greenhouse gas emissions at current emission rates. Healthy peatlands lock up carbon, while absorbing and storing more.

These fragile habitats have been damaged in recent decades through natural erosion and by drainage carried out during attempts to make the land fit for farming and forestry. Restoring degraded peatlands by re-vegetating bare areas and blocking ditches to re-wet the peat stops the processes causing greenhouse gas emissions. Peatland restoration also alleviates flooding by slowing down water flowing off the hill, acting as giant sponges, and improves water quality by reducing the amount of sediment loss. Finally, once peatlands start to function properly again there are major nature conservation benefits for the wide range of plants and animals relying on them. Securing these benefits requires further funding to match the expertise that has been built up through the Peatland Action programme.

Second, we need to establish more woodland on the lower parts of our upland farms. This would make more shelter available to livestock exposed to increasing extreme weather events. It would also provide more wildlife habitats and, if trees are planted in the right places, also help reduce downstream flooding by holding back the water from saturated moorlands. This requires Scottish Forestry to work with farmers to radically refocus farm forestry schemes, which currently are forester rather than farmer orientated.

In the lowlands,  the focus must shift to increasing the variety of farm habitats, both to improve biodiversity and to reduce flood risk. Woodlands of different types and scale are essential as ecosystem enrichers, and incentives need to be  provided through re-orientation of forestry grant support from commercial planting.

Agricultural production from lowland farming systems has an important role to play in providing food security. But the intensive production systems are also associated with ongoing concerns about pollution, biodiversity loss and adverse impacts on soil and water resources.

The challenge on lowland farms is to maintain profitable food production while increasing the diversity of habitats, especially woodlands, unmanaged field margins, wetlands and wooded riversides. These would benefit both farmland biodiversity and help capture nutrients and soil escaping from fields into watercourses. Also, the ongoing practice for some vegetable systems of bare ground in the winter on friable soils suggests that continuous cover cropping, now being used in parts of Scotland, will be an important change to soil stewardship. Additionally, there is an argument for planting more trees on the prevailing weather side of arable farmland in the drought prone areas of eastern Scotland, so that ultimately moisture is transferred from the woodlands to the arable areas lessening the need for irrigation. More trees and hedges can also reduce the risk of crop losses from unseasonally strong winds.

Finally, combining some of these elements with recreating meanders on rivers, establishing field storage ponds to retain flood water, and managing those fields to reduce soil and water run-off would also provide ways of mitigating flood events by slowing the flow of water through the lowlands. To achieve this will require new Codes of Practice, as foreshadowed in the Schedules of the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024, and a switch of incentives from Tier 1 towards Tiers 2 and 3 to provide farmers with the support they will need to match the emerging willingness of many of them to adopt what had become to be known as ‘regenerative agriculture’.  Scottish Government’s ambition is to be a world leader in this, but requires some fundamental changes in policy and practice.

The need for a catchment scale approach to Scotland’s land use change

Our rich and diverse environment is increasingly recognised as making an essential contribution to society’s health and well-being. We also trade on the high quality of Scotland’s environment in order to attract visitors and sell products from our farming, forestry and fishery industries. Maintaining, and where necessary improving, the health of our environment is therefore of fundamental importance to achieving a healthy and sustainable Scotland.

Given the evidence we have already presented, improving water quality, managing flood risk, protecting our soils and reversing biodiversity declines are other key areas where improvements are required in the way that land is managed.

To make a real difference means putting measures in place at a scale much larger than an individual ownership unit. Managing land and water together at a river catchment scale is the most logical and ecologically sensible way to do this, and necessary to manage risks in a warming and more chaotic climate. It will:

• dramatically reduce nitrogen loading and diffuse pollution from agriculture, preventing pesticides and other chemicals being washed into our rivers and streams;
• restore degraded blanket bogs in the uplands to secure their value for wildlife, carbon storage and water quality; and
• establish a national ecological network in which nature restoration projects of all shapes and sizes contribute collectively to healthy resilient ecosystems across Scotland

Working with more regenerative uses of the land, ecological networks are nature’s highways . They connect habitats and green and blue spaces, allowing species to move more easily across the landscape. In turn, this decreases the likelihood of species extinctions, increasing genetic exchange and thereby improving ecosystem health and resilience in the face of climate change. This should be an important component of aiding the delivery of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s  target of protecting 30% of land and water areas by 2030.

We already have two key tools to help to change from the current fragmented practices to the required new approaches: the Land Use Strategy and Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s approach to Diffuse Pollution Priority Catchments. But, and it is a large but, these are not being used throughout Scotland, nor are they driving the support schemes for land and water. This has to change and quickly. So, what’s the problem? Why are we calling for more to be done?

Firstly, the scale of the challenges to be tacked is huge. Although millions of pounds are being spent on peatland restoration, we have only scratched the surface. Much more investment will be needed if we are to help restore all our degraded peatlands effectively and in the short time available before those on the east side of Scotland are prone to severe droughts every one in three, or two in every three years. In addition, the level of funds available to support agri-environment measures have historically been very low here in Scotland, with the measures overall applying to only 15-20% of farmed land, mainly field margins with minimal impact on the productive area or crop. This has to change with a redistribution of resources between the 4 tiers of the agricultural support scheme to ensure that all support is conditional on the best agricultural and soil management practice, and is fully enforced.

Secondly, and just as importantly, we have a Land Use Strategy that sets out why we need multiple benefits from the land and more integrated catchment management. And the Strategy itself also makes clear where it sits within the wider policy framework. However, it is not at all clear how the Land Use Strategy and its principles will actually be integrated across these policies in practice.

There is currently a disconnect between the Land Use Strategy and the wide range of policies which need to take it into account. The Land Use Strategy must therefore be the kernel for a ‘whole-of-government’ and ‘whole-of-society’ approach, including the means by which the Scottish Government’s Economic Strategy applies to land and water. Without it, we will never achieve a real policy push and recognition across all sectors of the Scottish Government of the need for an integrated catchment management approach to planning and decision-making. And, essentially, it needs to be applied around Scotland locally and regionally in a manner that reflects local environmental needs and circumstances as well reflecting the economic opportunities achievable, so that both will bring social and community benefits

Third, to aid this necessary progress, there is a need to re-review the earlier land use capability assessments, taking into account the effects of a warming and more chaotic climate and a more equitable distribution of benefits, burdens and risk. The range of expertise available within the Scottish Environment, Food & Agricultural Research Institutes (SEFARI) means that the Scottish Government is well placed to take this forward.

• This article is part of a series from the RSE’s Environment Community of Interest. The aim is to stimulate informed public debate on the many aspects and elements of this complex and vexed subject. We’d love to hear your thoughts about this piece, email us on publicpolicy@theRSE.org.uk.
• The RSE’s blog series offers personal views on a variety of issues. These views are not those of the RSE and are intended to offer different perspectives on a range of current issues.