Nature-friendly farming budget swells in UK – but cuts elsewhere make recovery fraught

Nature in the UK appeared to receive a rare funding boost in the June spending review, with the government setting a spending target of up to £2 billion a year for England’s environmental land management (ELM) scheme by 2028-29.

By steering public funds toward farmers who restore hedgerows, soils and wetlands, England’s ELM programme is meant to renew landscapes that absorb carbon, support pollinators and keep water clean while helping rural businesses stay viable in a changing climate.

If delivered in full, the package would elevate the UK’s post-Brexit model of investing public money in shared ecological care (rather than payments based on acreage) to one of the most generously funded in the world.

Yet, scrutinise the details and a more complicated story emerges.

Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

The review has trimmed the day-to-day budget of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in real terms. Defra now faces the unenviable task of signing and monitoring thousands of new ELM agreements with fewer staff and shrinking data resources. Without the capacity to check whether fields really have become richer in skylarks or streams clearer of fertiliser, large sums could be delayed or misdirected.

Scale is another challenge. An independent analysis published in 2024 estimated that roughly £6 billion every year across the UK is needed to bring agriculture in line with the Environment Act targets for habitat restoration and net zero commitments.

Even the full £2 billion promised for England would meet only about half of that evidence-based need. And the “up to” £400 million for trees and peatlands is not new money: it is funding that was first promised in 2024 and the payment schedule has still not been confirmed.

While the review earmarked £4.2 billion for flood and coastal defence, it does not specify how much of that will support nature-based measures such as floodplain restoration, or the creation of saltmarshes or riparian woodlands. The Environment Agency is consulting on a funding model that could embed such solutions, but the Treasury papers are silent on who will pay for that shift.

Tech spending dwarfs habitat investment

Contrast this with the sums heading to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

Roughly £30 billion is earmarked for nuclear fission, fusion research and carbon-capture hubs. These projects are heavy on concrete and steel (materials with a hefty carbon cost) but have no immediate ecological benefit.

While new low-carbon technologies are crucial, thriving and resilient soils, wetlands and woodlands nourish food systems, safeguard water and hold vast stores of carbon – benefits that deepen and become more cost-effective over time.

Nature-based solutions can also revitalise local economies. The Office for National Statistics estimates that replacing the benefits flowing from the UK’s forests, rivers and soils – flood buffering, crop pollination, cleaner air, recreation and more – would cost about £1.8 trillion, a figure that only hints at their deeper, immeasurable value.

Yet the review sets out no plan to safeguard these life-support systems, or to factor their decline into the Treasury’s green book (the rule book used to appraise public investments) or the Bank of England’s stress tests, which check how shocks could ripple through the financial system.

This is also a matter of fairness and public health. Growing evidence shows that regular contact with nature lowers the risks of heart disease and anxiety, while improving children’s cognitive development. These are benefits with a value that defies any price tag.

Yet the places with the fewest trees and parks tend to be the same post-industrial towns ministers want to “level up”. The review is silent on biodiversity net gain (the flagship policy meant to channel private finance into local habitats) and on a proposed national nature wealth fund that could blend public and private capital for large-scale restoration.

Housing money could repeat past mistakes

One line in the spending review could still shift the balance.

The chancellor has earmarked £39 billion for building social and affordable housing over the next decade. If every development delivers at least a 10% net gain for biodiversity onsite, and if schemes build in climate-smart design (living roofs, shade-giving street trees, permeable surfaces) with local residents, Britain could pioneer the world’s first large-scale, nature-positive, net-zero housing programme.

Without those safeguards, “levelling up” risks repeating old mistakes: sealing green space under concrete today and paying tomorrow to retrofit drainage, shade and parks.

That risk is heightened by the government’s planning and infrastructure bill, now before parliament. In an open letter to MPs, economists and ecologists warn that the bill would let developers “pay cash to trash” irreplaceable habitats by swapping onsite protection for a levy, a move they describe as a “licence to kill nature”.

At the next UN climate summit, Cop30 in Brazil in November 2025, the UK will have to show the world that its domestic spending matches its international rhetoric.

More than 150 UK researchers made that point in an open letter to the prime minister, urging him to put nature at the centre of the UK’s Cop30 stance. Converting the Treasury’s headline figures into habitat gains and locking robust rules into both the planning bill and the housing drive would give ministers credible proof of progress when they update the UK’s climate and nature pledges on the Cop30 stage.

The spending review may have nudged farm policy in the right direction and set a new higher water mark for nature-positive agriculture. Yet amid the squeeze on Defra, the recycling rather than expansion of tree and peat budgets and the continued dominance of technology over habitat, nature still comes a distant second to hard infrastructure in the UK growth model.

There is still time to change course. Guaranteeing Defra’s capacity, publishing a timetable for the tree-and-peat fund, reserving part of the flood budget for community-led nature-based solutions and hardwiring strong biodiversity net gain rules into housing and planning reforms would turn headline promises into projects that enrich daily life while stewarding public money wisely.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Nathalie Seddon receives funding from UKRI and the Leverhulme Trust and sits on the UK Climate Change Committee. She is also a trustee of the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance and is a non-executive director of the social venture, Nature-based Insights.