The fields around Norney Farm are turning green again. After months in which the freely draining sandy soil of the Surrey Hills gave up what little moisture it had, the rain has returned, and the land is starting to soak up that relief. I have felt the urge to exhale in moments like this.
But I have been thinking about what the green actually means. The Environment Agency recently stressed that while it is understandable to think the drought is over, there is still a very long way to go. Reservoir storage has fallen to 56% nationally (nearly 20% below where we would expect it to be at this time of year). Thirteen reservoirs are less than half full. Ten areas remain in official drought.
So whilst the return of green is welcome, it is if anything, dulled by the risks that lurk within it. Because a decade on from Mark Carney’s 2015 landmark “tragedy of the horizon” speech, it feels as though the window of opportunity to collectively act on risks that will materialise beyond the typical timeframe of political and financial decision-making is shrinking ever more.
I talk about this a lot in my Founders’ Notes, and this summer was another proof point that the need for resilience is increasingly urgent and the window for action is closing. So why aren’t we developing it fast enough?
The spatial targeting problem
Every year, taxpayer money flows through Defra into Environmental Land Management schemes. The intended return of cleaner rivers, reduced flood risk, restored nature, and greater food security is one most people across the political spectrum would value and support.
The actual return is largely unquantifiable, because the money is not going to the places where it would do the most good.
There is also a blind spot in how we are viewing this problem. Even with Defra’s allocation of £310m to new agreements across both application windows in SFI26, this is principally not a funding problem. It is a targeting one.
Defra’s own SFI26 Window 2 analysis, published last week, illustrates precisely why this targeting matters. The most popular actions among the 12,200 applications received were managing low-input grassland, hedgerows, herbal leys, and winter bird food, which are undoubtedly all rational choices for supporting resilient food production.
But the actions that most directly link to bracing for extremes like this summer’s (agroforestry systems designed to reduce soil erosion and flooding, or buffer strips next to watercourses) did not make the top five despite paying some of the highest rates in the scheme.
Rational individual choices, in the absence of spatial targeting, do not add up to a national resilience strategy. What we’re missing is the mechanism, and indeed the vision, to allow funding to be allocated to the places best suited for delivering resilience on the ground.
The mechanism that would solve it follows a clear sequence:
- Backsolve from the National Risk Register and reports such as the Climate Scorpion report to identify which climate exposures carry the greatest national cost when they materialise.
- Apply the science, through academic organisations like the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, to determine which land management interventions materially reduce each risk.
- Use OS NGD, LiDAR, and soil data to identify precisely where each intervention should go to deliver the greatest return.
- Then quantify that return for Treasury, using economic modelling frameworks of the kind developed by organisations like eftec, so that public funding can establish a credible price floor per hectare. This can then be topped up by the likes of private buyers, water companies, insurers, and food retailers.
A degraded catchment increases the severity and cost of flooding downstream. Poorly managed upland vegetation, without strategic firebreaks, increases wildfire spread. A wildfire that reaches a town costs millions in emergency response and damage.
We price what is needed to recover, but rarely what it would take to prevent the loss (at scale) in the first place. Costs that spatially targeted prevention would have made unnecessary.
Take the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate in Somerset, where, amidst the brown and brittle countryside this summer, aerial photographs showed river corridors remaining green and full of wildlife. That was the result of a decade of designing the landscape as living infrastructure that absorbs shock from the start, rather than in the moment of crisis.
The proof of concept that already exists
The Forestry Commission’s England Woodland Creation Offer demonstrates that this model works in practice. Scientific rules determine where woodland creation delivers the greatest return across flood risk, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity. It is operational and, within its domain, demonstrably effective.
Yet this summer begs the question of why not apply the same logic to riparian buffers, agroforestry, drought resilience infrastructure, and upland vegetation management.
Undoubtedly, the solutions required today are institutional rather than scientific. Legacy systems and long-term administrative contracts were never built to deliver agile, targeted responses. Crucially, the slow pace of structural reform is now fundamentally mismatched with the velocity of change in the natural world, where environmental swings are becoming more extreme, less predictable, and increasingly difficult to mitigate through traditional planning cycles.
That the EWCO model remains an isolated case study rather than a blueprint for the entire Environmental Land Management programme is, in plain terms, a policy misstep.
What I’m looking out for this autumn
To return to Carney. “Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.” So as we enter autumn with large parts of the country still in drought, and an unprecedented El Niño forecast bringing even more uncertainty, this is precisely the defining scenario that exposes the inadequacy of a land management system without spatial targeting.
In other words, the dots are all there, but we need to move fast enough to connect them while there is still time to act. That is, ultimately, the role of a functional digital infrastructure that can direct public funding to the right places and allow private finance to follow:
- Investable units of resilience with defined outcomes.
- Credible measurement.
- Long-term buyers who gain economically from the interventions.
If we don’t build it, then the cost will be written in the parched fields of the Surrey Hills, in the hillsides that burned in Snowdonia, in emergency packages that treat the symptom rather than the cause, and in a National Risk Register whose warnings are being confirmed, season by season, without yet being systematically acted upon.
Tim Hopkin
Founder and CEO
