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SDG: 15 Life on land

Life on land

For farmers and others committed to transforming our food systems, the term regenerative agriculture (RA) has become a unifying concept and one which has enabled a wider community of producers, retailers, financers and others to embrace an agenda of change. But how confident are we in regenerative agriculture’s environmental and productivity claims? And what would a regenerative shift in UK agriculture mean for our food system as a whole?

Farm-level confidence in RA’s farm-scale benefits seems high, and research on regenerative practices is growing. However, modelling struggles to navigate uneven agro-ecological data and the complexities of context-specific solutions, while the focus on farm-level data often positions RA as a purely agricultural concern.

Calls for new food policy demand connection between food, health and environment, and the incentivisation of a just transition in what we grow and what we eat. The effects of a regenerative shift in UK food supply across diverse farm systems will have both local and global consequences for food affordability, availability, nutritional quality and supply stability, as well as for land use.

This Sprint aimed to clarify if and how RA can lead to greater alignment between land and environmental goals on the one hand, and food and nutrition security on the other, while identifying what policies would enable a just transition for the sector and for those it supplies.

Working with various partners and stakeholders, the research team from TABLE explored diverse visions of RA and investigate their implications for the UK food system and its impacts overseas. Through deliberative workshops and wide engagement, we produced an account of what these visions and associated practices imply for society. What would the different versions of regenerative agriculture identified mean for the composition, quality and affordability of our diets, for our environment and the species we farm and share it with? What policy and supply system needs, risks and opportunities would be entailed? We asked modellers and practitioners to consider the indicators available to mark progress in relation to different versions of RA. Recognising the mistrust sometimes at play between researchers and practitioners, we asked this group to explore how far the preferred RA futures can be measured, analysed and understood by modelling.

A collaboratively developed picture of regenerative agriculture and its implications can enable greater confidence in the development of food policy integrated with environmental and social aims, drive more rigorous private sector strategies, and support civil society in holding both government and other sectors to account.

Why this SPRINT? Why now?

There is considerable interest, among public and private actors, in regenerative agriculture (RA) as a route to achieving land-based goals around net zero, biodiversity, soil health and climate resilience, matched by corporate commitments and increasing investments in research. However, the potential system-level implications of a shift towards regenerative farming remain unclear.

As a new government grapples with calls for comprehensive food policy, and the response and implementation periods for strategic publications such as the Land Use Framework and CCC reports play out in the next two years, there is a receptive policy environment for approaches that can genuinely connect environmental, health and social goals. Increasingly public corporate commitments on RA suggest space for private-public collaboration on these goals too; however, concerns and differences remain around the potential for greenwashing and the nature of the farming systems and types of transition desired.

Co-design and engagement enabled this project to contribute to a better environment for collaboration on RA between private, public and third sectors.

We worked directly with partners The Food Foundation and Green Alliance. We also collaborated closely with a core stakeholder group that included FAIRR, Nestle, the Soil Association, Waitrose, the John Innes Centre & Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development, Landworkers’ Alliance, Pasture-fed Livestock Association, Nature-friendly Farming Network, British Ecological Society, and the RSPB.

Finance is a major structural driver of biodiversity loss, but potentially could also be a big part of the solution.

It is estimated that around $7 trillion (per annum) of financial flows are damaging the environment, including via harmful subsidies (UNEP 2023). At the same time, we see a significant ‘nature-finance gap’, estimated at 5-7 times current spending on biodiversity conservation globally (approximately $200 billion pa; Deutz et al. 2020).

This is acknowledged in the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework (GBF) with Targets 14, 15, 16, 18 and 19 all targeting the tackling of harmful subsidies, the need of businesses and financial institutions to assess and address their impacts, risks and dependencies on nature, and upscale nature-positive investment. The GBF recognises therefore that reducing harm and addressing the nature finance gap will require a mix of ‘greening finance’ and ‘financing green’ approaches. However these goals are aspirational, and there remain critical evidence gaps about how to achieve them in practice.

In this Sprint, we aimed to address three major evidence gaps, through high-impact, novel research with direct policy relevance, conducted in collaboration with policymakers:

  1. how to reduce the biodiversity impacts of UK foreign investments and align UK international financial flows with the ambitions of the GBF through greening finance (reducing the UK private finance share of the $7 trillion pa);
  2. how to scale up private finance for financing green to help close the ‘nature-finance’ gap and achieve these overall goals; and
  3. how interventions aimed at greening finance and financing green can work synergistically together to achieve overall goals of the Kunming-Montreal agreement.

Together, these research streams aimed to combine to deliver the first empirically-grounded, detailed picture of how mechanisms for greening finance and financing green can interact to support a country’s contributions to meeting the goals of the GBF. This will provide key information to Defra looking to help facilitate the UK’s and other countries’ implementation of the GBF, as well as inform their policy on global financial architecture.

Why this SPRINT? Why now?

Global biodiversity continues its long-term decline, and yet despite decades of rhetoric, many of the structural drivers of biodiversity loss remain unabated. Yet we are running out of time to start implementing real solutions; the Earth system is demonstrating preliminary signs of severe stress that may well eventually cause catastrophic economic damage to humanity.

If the Sprint is successful, we want to be the first team and set of policy institutions to have credible answers to how to achieve the finance targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework, as far as possible based on real data. This will enable Defra’s international team to share empirically-derived advice with LMICs and partners in the global south, and allow countries in the EU and globally to learn from the UK’s experience in their development of their national implementation and finance strategies which are a mandatory component of the forthcoming EU Restoration Law. Importantly, the evidence from the Sprint will also include social considerations (in the Oxfordshire case study) and investigate empirically how to make sure the investment generated by nature markets ends up in the right places to also achieve community-inclusive development and support the SDGs and align with domestic agendas such as Levelling Up. This is key to avoiding internationalising nature markets which exacerbate social inequities, which is currently a very real possibility.