Royal Society's Multifunctional landscapes

February 9, 2023

⊕These are notes from my reading of the executive summary of the Multifunctional landscapes report the Royal Society published earlier this week. The summary is really succinct and makes all the good points in five recommendations. These are some of my opinionated highlights.

Now is a critical time for land use policy globally (e.g., climate change, energy crisis), but particularly in the UK (e.g., Brexit). Science and innovation have several important roles in helping manage landscapes better (the report lists several of them in detail).

• Recommendation 1 - embrace a multifunctional approach that considers multiple market and non-market land-based outputs.
• Recommendation 2 - the critical role of research and innovation, which needs to be oriented to continue increasing the productivity and profitability of farming, but also expanded in three critical ways: take a multifunctional perspective (see R.1); pay much greater attention to sustainability; and carry out more research on landscape functions and how they interact with each other (trade-off’s and synergies).
• Recommendation 3 - increase and adapt skills, training and advice for land managers
• Recommendation 4 - “A novel data science-driven approach is needed to develop a high-quality common evidence base to underpin land use decisions”. This ons hits really close to home, so I’m just going to reproduce it here verbatim:

Decision-making in multifunctional landscapes will benefit from integration of information about all aspects of landscapes including farm and forestry outputs, biophysical data (such as topography, climate, soils and biodiversity) and ecosystem services, as well as socioeconomic data such as land values, land ownership and livelihoods dependent on land-based-activities. Some of this information is available but is of variable quality, relevance, timeliness and accessibility. A more strategic national approach to land-based information, with clear data standards and protocols and creation of a common evidence platform, would empower decision-makers with a consistent set of science-based inputs from which to negotiate land use decisions. It would also facilitate the incorporation of new data streams made available by technological advances. Consistent and scientifically robust baselines, metrics and systematic monitoring programmes are needed to better understand the state of landscapes and what they are being used for, and to track progress towards meeting policy objectives.

• Recommendation 5 - We need spatially explicit national land use frameworks to judge the compatibility of different policy commitments. These need to be based on robust data and analytics, and be transparent.

The Royal Society (2023). Multifunctional landscapes: Informing a long-term vision for managing the UK’s land - Executive summary. ISBN: 978-1-78252-633-9. https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/living-landscapes/multifunctional-land-use/