PLENTY OF FRESH AIR AND FOOD FOR THOUGHT
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A Field Trip by the Connectors
by Kerry Waylen
At the end of July, a group from the Sustainable Land Use Connectors went on a field trip to East Neuk. We were a mix of people from academic, statutory agencies, land agents and third sector organisations. Many thanks to the Fife Coasts and Countryside Trust (FCCT), Forth Rivers Trust (FRT), and the Balcaskie Estate for hosting us and helping to make this happen.
What did we do? We visited the Dreel Burn and Balcaskie Wetlands, stomped about the mud to admire and hear about the work done there over the past years, and then moved to the Dreel Halls in Anstruther for an afternoon discussion. We also heard about work happening in the Leven linked to the LENS (Landscape Enterprise Networks) approach, aided by Alison Ricketts from 3Keel stopping by in the afternoon.
The focus of our discussions was the challenges of brokering new partnerships for sustainable land management – e.g. how to go about getting funding and support from new private sector companies in ways that were feasible and enabled sustainable land management. This can be challenging in lots of ways, from getting started in being able to identifying potential partners and ways to work with them, through to agreeing a contract that is fair to all parties, through to identifying monitoring schemes that are feasible.
Did we feel like we sorted out all these challenges? Not completely. For example, one perennial challenge is how to design a monitoring schema that is both reliable and economic. Focusing on monitoring only one issue, or using only one technology, will offer only a partial insight. Combinations of tracking and remote sensing technology may help improve insights; also citizen science may be appropriate. Tracking both actions taken and contextual factors (e.g. weather events) can also be useful. But then the more information we collect, the bigger the cost and more the challenges for combining it in evaluation and communicating it for decision-making. We discussed all these issues, but during our field trip we didn’t come up with a perfect recipe for monitoring.
However, as one participant wisely observed, we are gaining knowledge. Many of us are more confident in our expectation of the likely challenges and pitfalls of trying to negotiate new partnerships: so, if knowing is ‘half the battle’, then we are in a good position. Our terminology is also sharpening. For example, the proposal to refer to ‘green commerce’ rather than green finance was met with lots of nods; finance refers to for-profit investors, but we are more often seeing partnerships with organisations who wish to manage risk to their supply chain or reputation.
Additionally, we talked about lots of other things too. Topics that I jotted down in my notebook range from; changes in staffing and priorities in key organisations, ecological changes observed when rewetting land, what pollutants make water turn blue, through to the challenges of liaising across land-owner boundaries. All of this is valuable for helping plan future work, and I wouldn’t get a chance to discuss if I stayed behind my desk. Also, we discussed ‘other stuff’ such as the best kind of biscuit to buy for a workshop, and why on earth a bat that we saw would be flapping about in the middle of the day – if anybody has definitive answers to either of those two questions then please do let me know!
Opportunities such as this can feel like a rare treat; a whole day of time, and travel costs, isn’t a trivial commitment. But I really feel field trips are worth it: discussing issues in the field, face to face, really helps to give in-depth insight into ongoing work, and builds interpersonal connections across organisations and sectors. Therefore, the Connectors will return to meeting online for the next few times, and not consider another field trip until next year.
If anybody else wants to join in with our Connectors group – and perhaps help suggest a trip for next year – then please do get in contact: Kerry.Waylen@hutton.ac.uk