For a few dark days in summer 2022, England’s new Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs) looked like it might be a casualty of Liz Truss’s bonfire. A coalition of farming unions and environmental NGOs alike jumped to its defence, lauding it as *the* post-Brexit bonus and saviour of English agriculture.
As an over-complicated agri-environment scheme, the aims of the ELMs are laudable. The key challenge it faces though, is that it lacks having a coherent purpose to start with, leaving it at risk of being all things to all people.
This was brought home to me in an appearance at a net zero APPG discussion on decarbonising land use (the correct term should really be recarbonising land, but we’ll let it pass). Other panellists were adamant that ELMs was the best route for farmers to achieve net zero, as it supported beneficial activities while enabling private finance for ecosystem services like carbon sequestration. I disagreed.
There are multiple barriers in the way of developing an effective private market for soil carbon sequestration in England and ELMs is definitely one of them. Defra has tried admirably to leave space for private markets to develop, in stark contrast, for example, to the Sustainable Farming Scheme in Wales, which almost overtly excludes private investment in land management outcomes.
“Land managers have been slow to pick up on the material differences between carbon avoidance and sequestration, and the differences between carbon stocks and carbon flows”
