Illustrations by Jonathan Halls.
By Melissa Minter, Susan Baker, Euan Bowditch, Sheena Carlisle, Natasha Constant, Alix Syder, and Tom Finch.
People are contesting the future of land use in the UK uplands, with the climate and nature crises prompting calls to change land use and increase tree cover. Increasing tree cover is likely to result in both positive and negative outcomes. Thus, integrating stakeholder preferences into future scenarios is important to promote social acceptance and identify potential conflicts.
We combined in-person workshops with spatial modelling to create stakeholder-led scenarios of land use in 2050 in two upland landscapes: the North Pennines & Dales (England) and the Elenydd (Wales). Stakeholders were interested in different ways of increasing tree cover including both low density, for example, wood pasture, and high density such as closed woodlands, each established through both natural colonisation and planting. Their scenarios resulted in tree cover increasing by as much as nearly three-fold in the Elenydd and almost four-fold in the North Pennines, though some stakeholders’ scenarios saw smaller changes. We then modelled the impact of each scenario on bird populations, greenhouse gas emissions, water run-off, recreation, livestock and timber production. With increasing tree cover, we found reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and water-run off and increases in woodland birds and recreation. While there were mixed impacts on timber production, we predict negative impacts on livestock numbers and upland birds. The potential decline of upland birds was of most concern to all stakeholder groups, suggesting further research is required to disentangle how future land use scenarios could reduce trade-offs while still resulting delivering positive change across other outcomes.
Relational Thinking 