Triggering environmental transformation on large land holdings

This project will use an established conceptual framework for understanding transformational change in agriculture (the ‘Triggering Change Model’), to assess how substantive environmental changes in large land-holding trajectories can be enabled. Large landholders are high impact but ‘hard-to-reach’ and will be brought into the research through Scottish Land and Estates, a popular membership organisation. Interviews will assess change trajectories on large holdings, with a specific focus on succession processes (a well-recognised moment for change which is internal to the landholding unit). Workshops will be conducted with interview participants to assess the effectiveness of climate change mapping tools (a novel, external means of triggering change). Findings will be analysed to identify best practice in supporting the managers of large land holdings to make transformational change, enabling industry organisations to better support their members, and provide a foundation for future research which integrate social and natural sciences.

Project lead: Naomi Beingessner (The James Hutton Institute)

Project collaborators: Large landowners recruited through Scottish Land and Estates (SLE), facilitated by Eleanor Kay (SLE Senior Policy Advisor),  Annie McKee (The James Hutton Institute), Mike Rivington (The James Hutton Institute), Mohamed Jabloun (The James Hutton Institute), Lee-Ann Sutherland (The James Hutton Institute)

Findings

Key triggers of change on large landholdings are:
(i) Policy change – changes to financial support available to landowners enabled them to take environmentally beneficial actions
(ii) Financial priorities – landowners with external sources of income can more easily make changes, but some dependant on estates for income noted financial benefits from environmental actions
(iii) Succession processes – aspirations for environmental actions and taking a long-term approach are mediated by pressing financial priorities and ensuring landholding viability
(iv) Extreme weather events – increased frequency and the resulting wind and flood damage prompted participants to take environmental actions to improve their land’s resilience

Better communication using climate change models requires:

• clearer comparisons between observed and modelled data and explanation of changes in variability
• use of Artificial Intelligence to generate illustrations of the range of land use outcomes from different climate projections
• focus on next steps e.g., what crop varieties should be planted?

Suggestions for further research

• Exploring the interrelationship between succession processes on large landholdings and climate resilience (and how successors may be supported to achieve environmental change/climate resilience).
• Given the key finding about financial priorities, there is also a need to explore those landholdings without successors (e.g. corporate ownership)
• Similar workshops with other types of land managers (e.g. forestry managers/farm consultants) may be valuable as they might have different perspectives on the potential utility of the climate change visualisations for land management decision-making
• Investigating options to utilise AI approaches in combination with the projection visualisations and crop modelling and land capability assessments to provide summary reports