4 April 2025

“They’re not making land anymore”, several farmers I know like to joke. And that’s a bit of a sticky situation, given all the demands on land we now face.

In fact, UK governments have committed to;

🌳 planting 50,000h of trees

🦉 10% of farmland for wildlife

🌊 protecting 30% of land and seas

🏡 building 1.6 million homes

🍽️ maintaining food production

Oof. What do we do then?

That’s where ‘land use innovation’ comes in. Here’s a report about this very topic, jointly published by AFN Network+, Royal Agricultural University (RAU), Land Use for Net Zero Nature and People (LUNZ) Hub, and the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise.

5 KEY POINTS: Land use innovation – how the UK can unlock solutions to the pressures on land

1. We need a more strategic approach to land-use, fit for modern pressures

The UK’s approach to land use was built for a different era, in the aftermath of WW2, with priorities such as social mobility and food security. Times have changed though and there are now urgent, unavoidable and interrelated global factors that are driving us to reconsider how land is used to underpin economic prosperity. Most investment in innovation relating to land management has been sector specific. However, more strategic land use innovation is essential and gaining traction, focused on integrating, optimising and coordinating diverse land uses. This is land use innovation. It harnesses synergies and manages the trade-offs between multiple demands on land.

2. Thankfully, the UK research community has substantial capacity to support land use innovation

This work is interdisciplinary, often international, and backed by substantial public and private investment. Research related to innovation or transitions in land use or management has surged over the past decade, in the UK and globally. Over 100 UK universities and research institutes have published research in this field. This is an increasingly established research community, with extensive collaboration among universities and research institutes. Private investment in innovative UK companies within this sector has also been growing. Capital invested in innovative land management businesses in the UK has increased more than 30- fold in a decade, from £8M in 2013 to £262M in 2022.

3. However, the UK has limited ‘soft’ infrastructure capacity to support land use innovation

The UK lacks ‘soft’ infrastructure for knowledge exchange, commercialisation and scale-up in land use innovation that would enable the research community and others to focus on the challenges of integrating, optimising and coordinating the competing pressures on land. The main land-based sectors have specialist scale-up infrastructure, such as incubators, but there is little dedicated support for strategic innovation that bridges land use sectors. Key functions include connecting entrepreneurs, researchers and funders, providing shared facilities, and supporting commercialisation and market development. The UK is often characterised as world-leading in research but lagging other countries in innovation and productivity.

4. A new hub, based at RAU, could help fill this infrastructure gap

Forty UK-based professionals in the land use sector were asked about the potential demand and benefit of providing dedicated support for strategic land use innovation. They included businesses, government agencies, charities and academics. Most interviewees agreed that this was a need worth addressing. They were most interested in training and staff development, knowledge exchange, thought leadership and research support. They had mixed views on whether these needs would best be met through virtual support or co-location at a physical incubator or hub. Those envisaging a physical hub, said a mix of people would be critical, including; policy-makers, established businesses such as rural property companies and land agents, start-ups, and researchers to help spark, co-develop and test innovations. The Royal Agricultural University led this research to inform a new land use innovation incubator and cluster on its campus at Cirencester. This will launch in 2025.

5. Government should invest in dedicated infrastructure for land use innovation

This would help accelerate the development of tools to implement its strategic vision for land, align with its industrial strategy and consolidate the UK’s global leadership in providing solutions in this field. This could yield economic dividends, reducing costs to taxpayers by targeting incentives and improving the coherence and efficiency of policies relating to land, reducing externalities, and enabling private investment in nature recovery, and create economic opportunities.

Examples of land use innovation

1. Finance – Green finance for natural capital and nature-based carbon emissions reduction and sequestration, such as Exchange Market by Soil Association Exchange.
2. Digital – Decision-support tools based on maps and geospatial data such as Land App.
3. Management – Technical and administrative ways of integrating land uses, for example through nature-based solutions, agroforestry or agrivoltaics.
4. Commerce – Establishing new markets, such as for biodiversity net gain and environmental resilience through networks such as ‘Landscape Enterprise Networks’ (LENs).
5. Policy – Developing land use frameworks to coordinate decisions across planning, agriculture and other policy domains.
6. Legal – Novel contracts for tenants and land managers, such as The Crown Estate’s new Environmental Farm Business Tenancy.
7. Education – Developing new skills associated with all the above, such as Scotland’s new Nature-based Jobs and Skills Implementation Plan 2024-2025.
8. Community – Communities taking ownership of land to manage it for local needs and priorities, for example through Community Land Trusts.

More about the report

This report was written by Tom MacMillan (RAU and one of our Co-Investigators), Emily Norton (our Land Use Policy Champion, wearing her freelance Farm Foresight Ltd hat), Katherine Lewis (RAU) and Verity Payne (Farm491), plus the 40 folk (anonymous) who shared their thoughts in interviews.

If you are interested in finding out more or getting involved, please contact Innovation.Village@rau.ac.uk.