By Godfred Amankwaa, Jolyon M. Medlock, Kayleigh. M. Hansford, Lucy Gilbert, Bethan V. Purse, and Festus A. Asaaga
This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.
Globally, biodiversity conservation initiatives, greening policies, and land use transformations have increasingly been promoted as pathways to sustainable agriculture and ecosystem restoration. For instance, farmers across the UK participate in agri-environment schemes, programmes in which they receive payments for adopting environmentally friendly farming practices such as reducing livestock numbers, restoring habitats, and managing woodlands. Despite their well-documented benefits for biodiversity and climate, these ambitious environmental policies also have costs. These initiatives and policies are implemented across diverse landscapes by actors with different interests, priorities, and outcomes, (un)intentionally creating trade-offs and contestations, including concerns about tick and species habitat expansion, and the associated disease transmission risks in people and livestock.
To explore these trade-offs, we analysed policy documents and conducted multi-stakeholder interviews across the UK, including farmers, land managers, conservationists, public health, animal health and policy actors, to understand the different narratives and meanings people attach to the relationship between agri-environment schemes and tick-related risks.
Despite agri schemes providing financial support for farmers and delivering important environmental benefits, we identified two distinct but overlapping narratives on these relationships. The first is the catalyst narrative, which described four specific pathways through which scheme rules create conditions in which ticks thrive: (1) restrictive seasonal grazing calendars that disrupt traditional tick management; (2) reduced livestock stocking rates that allow vegetation to grow denser and taller; (3) limitations on traditional practices like burning; and (4) wildlife habitat creation that increases tick host populations without corresponding management support. The second narrative situated agri-environment schemes within a broader ecological picture, where climate change, expanding wildlife populations, and historical land use patterns all play equally significant roles in driving tick risks. Across these, what mattered more was each person’s relationship to the land, their experience of tick-borne disease, and the knowledge they had built up over time, whether through years of working on the land, scientific research, or policy practice.
Our study shows that the two narratives are not competing accounts but different and equally meaningful ways of knowing a shared challenge at the interface of land, wildlife, and human and livestock health. We conclude by arguing that embracing plural knowledges and co-producing understanding across diverse stakeholder perspectives and disciplines, rather than privileging any single account, offers a more inclusive and holistic approach to governing the complex trade-offs between conservation policies, interventions and infectious disease risks.
