Land Use for Net Zero Hub

Lead Research Organisation: James Hutton Institute
Department Name: Social, Economic and Geographical Scien

Abstract

We live in the critical decade for climate change. The world increasingly experiences the damages and losses from extreme weather events caused by human-made climate change. Crop losses, devastating floods, catastrophic wildfires and rising sea levels cannot be ignored. If we do not achieve a balance between our greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the air, these impacts will become considerably worse and more dangerous. The UK has legally committed to achieving a net zero greenhouse gas balance by 2050. However, it is currently hotly debated how this goal can be achieved.
The Land Use for Net Zero (LUNZ) Hub brings together researchers, policy-makers, industry leaders, innovators and rural community representatives from all four nations of the UK. Our 33 member organisations include researchers and practitioners from green finance, agricultural advisory organisations, NGOs, and an arts collective.
The goal of the LUNZ hub is to accelerate positive land use change that reduces harmful greenhouse gas emissions, increases food security and restores a healthy environment for plants, animals and people. The Hub will equip UK policy-makers, industry and stakeholders with the advice they need, in the format and timeframe they require, to take policy decisions to help avert dangerous climate change and lead to a better future.
We will bring together scientific evidence and stakeholder perspectives to define shared, net zero scenarios (plausible alternative futures)and credible pathways (steps including policies and incentives) to achieve them by 2050. The Hub will establish an Agile Policy Centre, a Net Zero Futures Platform, and a Creative Methods Lab. Within the Hub, our four National Teams will work together with our Topic Expert Groups to build capacity for a Just Transition to net zero that benefits people and planet alike.
The Hub will support the UK Government and the devolved administrations in achieving multiple environmental goals by understanding the impacts of policy decisions on all relevant aspects, including renewable energy, agriculture, planning frameworks, afforestation, water management, nature conservation, biodiversity, and rural economies.
The Hub will work on several priority policy areas:
1. Land use change that benefits the environment and is socially just, leading to ecosystem co-benefits such as biodiversity, soil health, human health and wellbeing, and green growth at national, regional and local levels;
2. Future agricultural, environmental and food policies that deliver a net zero future, building on the Agriculture Act 2020, Environment Act 2021, Agriculture Bill 2022 (Wales) and 2023 (Scotland), including future sources of finance, payment schemes and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase removals while strengthening food security, biodiversity and land-based businesses (e.g. farms, crofts, forestry);
3. Integrating policy with carbon and natural capital markets, to ensure that the drivers and mechanisms for on-the-ground transformation work together for optimal outcomes.
Achieving net zero by 2050 will require new technologies and practices which lower greenhouse gas emissions. These will include soil improvement practices, peatland protection and restoration, removal of greenhouse gases from the air and decarbonising our economy, large-scale tree-planting to take up carbon from the air, creation and restoration of habitats, transitioning to a circular economy, and significantly reduce food waste and consumption of higher emitting foodstuffs.
To cover these diverse areas the Hub is comprised of the primary players in the UKRI AgriFood for Net Zero Network+, Landscape Decisions Programme, and principal investigators from Greenhouse Gas Removals, Changing the Environment, Digital Environment, AI for Net Zero, and Treescapes Programmes. This team have the experience and expertise to bring together a single voice of authority for Net Zero transformation in the UK.

Technical Summary

We are in the critical decade for climate mitigation. The LUNZ Hub will synthesise the breadth of policies driving land use change, including on renewable energy, agriculture, planning frameworks, afforestation, biodiversity, and water management, and co-design scenarios and pathways to achieve them and deliver UK and 4 nations international commitments and national policies.

The LUNZ Hub is built on principles of capacity building and Just Transition. It brings together 33 organisations comprising world-leading researchers from multiple disciplines, public agencies, green finance, agricultural advisory organisations, NGOs, and an arts collective into a transdisciplinary community. It will co-develop evidence-based, credible pathways to achieving Net Zero together with our project partners, stakeholder and policy-makers across the UK and in the devolved administrations.

The Hub is designed to be an agile, 'big tent, four nations approach' analysing, aggregating and translating and communicating evidence to support policy-makers and other stakeholders to deliver transformative changes in land use, agricultural systems and soil health to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Our Agile Policy Centre, Net Zero Futures Platform, and Creative Methods Lab, underpinned by National Teams, and Topical Expert Groups, will lead to a transformative, holistic understanding of multifunctional landscapes and plausible pathways to net zero futures that deliver co-benefits for biodiversity and people. Those pathways and resultant changes require to be socially-just at all levels, integrating existing instruments of policy and practice with new green market mechanisms to achieve net zero.

Its core aim is to synthesise and fast track emerging evidence from the LUNZ research projects and key allied research programmes to inform policy at national, regional and local levels within the four nations of the UK.

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