This project provides an overview of the policy influences on rural land use, including an assessment of policy conflict and complementarity. Land use is a complex socio-ecological system producing benefits for land managers alongside multiple benefits for society. Land use modelling allows us to explore baselines and how changing policy and management objectives influence land use patterns and their private and societal impacts.

Policy interactions with land use

Competing demands placed on rural land are driven by land manager/owner decisions influenced by myriad policies. These policies often have synergistic aims, objectives, and delivery approaches. Yet potential conflicts remain between the outcomes they deliver. We review policies influencing land use decisions to assess policy complementarities and conflicts. This provides an overview of the policy landscape building on Scotland’s Third Land Use Strategy. The review supports an ethos that moves away from a sector-by-sector approach towards an overarching holistic picture of what sustainable land use in Scotland could look like and avoids mixed messages and incentives for land managers that can be counter-productive to delivering objectives. This activity links directly with the spatial analysis of land-based financial support mechanisms in a complementary project.

Disaggregated and combined Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry & Agriculture inventory

Scotland’s Climate Change Plan maintains a sectoral approach to emission targets with specific reference to taking a whole-farm approach to emissions accounting. This project uses a variety of emissions accounting datasets and methodologies to develop an approach at the holding/business level. This approach addresses the explicit requirement of Scotland’s climate change targets, that Scottish Ministers’ take account of a whole-farm approach to emissions accounting. It endeavours to disaggregate research undertaken for the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory that established a national framework for sectoral emissions. Combining with technical efficiency metrics (building on the work for the Suckler Beef Climate Group) provides insights into baseline emissions and mitigation potential across heterogenous land-use businesses. This activity identifies emissions hotspot locations in combination with outputs from work elsewhere and provides a greater understanding of policy impacts and where climate change mitigation potential exists.

Modelling land use options

Two modelling approaches are being applied to analyse land use policy and management scenarios, how they impact economic outcomes in the farming sector, and wider natural capital and ecosystem services. Understanding how policy changes impact land-based businesses is key to understanding the likelihood and distribution of management changes and how incentives can be targeted. The two approaches are complementary in approaching land use scenario analysis from different perspectives. Microsimulation offers a bottom-up approach rooted in the economics of real farm businesses, extrapolated over wider geographies. Spatial Bayesian Belief Networks combine socioeconomic and biophysical data to assess multiple benefits. Both are allowing the resulting patterns of impacts to be evaluated spatially.

Overall, this project builds on and refines established methodologies to provide an appreciation of the spatial patterns of land use policy and land manager responses. The GHG Inventory is being disaggregated from a top-down level to identify patterns of emissions hotspots and mitigation potential. Different modelling techniques are identifying wider spatial patterns of impact and benefits from current and potential future land uses.