Bridging the gap of sustainable land-use innovation implementation

With this Open Societal Challenge, I aim to enable more effective and fair programmes to encourage farmers and landowners to adopt sustainable land-use practices. Climate and environmental change make it imperative the regeneration of degraded land in the countryside and the transition to more environmentally friendly land uses via techniques such as climate-smart agriculture and agroforestry. This is a challenge in the UK, which is undergoing a bonanza of policies for ecosystem regeneration, sustainable farming and tree-planting, and elsewhere in the world, e.g. including programs funded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2023 Farm Bill in the U.S. While there are many such environmentally friendly technologies and practices, there is a gap between the scholarly knowledge about the techniques, and their implementation and adoption by farmers. This research challenge aims to deepen our understanding of the adoption of climate-smart and sustainable land uses, to inform public policymaking and private and non-for-profit programs to choose the right incentives for the right context. The predominant vision is that such incentives ought to be in the form of financial payments to farmers (such as payments for ecosystem services) and that these should be enough for farmers to try innovative sustainable practices. Instead, the long-term change I want to achieve through this OSC is to broaden this vision among scholars and practitioners. The new vision demonstrates that multiple motivations and incentives can help farmers and landowners pioneer sustainable and climate-smart innovations. This new vision helps identify leverages for change that may not have been entirely visible before, and which are actionable through better designed policies.