Synthesizing evidence in the economics of farm environmental biodiversity

Modern agriculture is vital to ensuring food security, but changes to the landscape due to intensive farming put ecosystems under stress. Natural landscapes provide many vital services: Wood- and shrubland can mitigate flooding by reducing surface runoff following heavy rains. They provide habitats for insects that pollinate our orchards and gardens, and animals that support thriving river ecosystems.

Effective agri-environmental policies are needed to ensure the sometimes opposing but crucially important goals of sustaining productive agriculture while maintaining landscape biodiversity and ecosystem services are met. The planned reform of UK agricultural policies following Brexit should support these goals while wrestling with the consequences for the sector from leaving the single market and the growing threat of climate change.

This research project focuses on factoring biodiversity values and designing cost-effective spatially targeted agri-environmental schemes. It achieves this by focusing on farmers' commitment to supporting ecosystem services where they have the most significant impact. We use data-driven tools to estimate the multifunctional value of natural landscapes and design contracts that support both biodiversity and flood management.

By providing schemes that encourage and reward farmers for collaborating with their neighbours to maximize habitat gains from relatively small individual commitments, we propose ways to limit the costs to the sector and ensure the greatest return on future public spending.