80 Voices: Tim Benton on why nature’s revival cannot wait

Standing on a drought-browned Ilkley Moor, Professor Emeritus Tim Benton can see the pressures facing farming and nature written across the landscape. 

Grass has stopped growing as it should. Farmers are already turning to winter forage. Fire risk is rising. The curlews, lapwings and other farmland birds that still hold on here are under growing pressure. 

For Tim, an ecologist and food security expert at the University of Leeds, this is not a distant warning. It is evidence of a food system being pushed beyond its limits, and of why nature’s revival on farmland must become an urgent national priority.

Here’s Tim, largely in his own words.

We’re at a tipping point for nature in the UK

Nature is not an optional extra around the edges of farming. It is the foundation beneath it. Nature, or ecology, or the environment: they provide the background to everything that we need from the Earth. And nature underpins the soil fertility, the climate provision. Pollination will give you the fruit. Natural enemies will control the pests.

The warning is already in the landscape

We’ve had between 1 and 5% of the rainfall that we’d normally get in the last couple of months. Grass has not grown in the way that it needs to. Farmers are starting to feed winter forage to the livestock. This leads to problems ahead, fire risk. The loss is ecological as well as agricultural. This landscape as one of the last strongholds for curlews, lapwings, oystercatchers and redshanks, birds now under intense pressure. All around, it’s kind of desert-like. It’s not a dusty, Saharan-type desert, but a desert nonetheless.

Resilience starts beneath our feet

In a hotter, drier and more volatile world, soil is one of farming’s most important defences. Soils are really important, particularly in the future that we’re facing, because without soils and water and fertility, we don’t have crops. Sustainably managed soils with a high carbon content can hold more water, providing a degree of drought resilience. A healthy, diverse community of bacteria and fungi also gives soil more capacity to keep functioning under stress. So, without managing soils well, you end up driving the ability of the soil to cope with change down and down and down, and you become addicted to the inputs that you put in. Relying on always being able to get artificial inputs in to replace what nature has given us, more or less for free, gives us a vulnerability.

Food security is national security

The old assumption was that markets would always fill the gap: if harvests failed here, food could simply be imported from somewhere else. In a volatile world, you can’t bet on trade in the way that we used to. Food security means having enough food to feed the population at a price people can afford. Without access to food, energy and water, he argues, territorial integrity means very little. For farming to survive climate change, whether it is drought or heatwave or wildfire or flood, we must adapt.

Nature recovery means whole-scale change

Nature recovery on farmland is not a wildflower strip here or a few trees in the corner of a field. It means working with nature across the whole farming system. It's a whole-scale change in farming. It means better soil and water management. It means leaving habitat for the small parasitic wasps that control aphids, reducing the need for pesticides. It means diversity across crops, seasons and landscapes. And it means bringing livestock, horticulture and arable farming back together so farms are less dependent on imported nitrogen fertiliser. It's about creating a landscapes that are not monocultural, large-scale, intensive but are heterogeneous, diverse, where there is space for wildlife to live. Unless you manage the food production areas sustainably, the intensification of the the farming area will end up declining in quality over the time and as the challenges mount.

We cannot wait to be forced into change.

The knowledge is not missing. We know how healthier soils, more diverse farming and nature-rich landscapes can build resilience. What is missing is the political will to move beyond business as usual. We will get to a point, at some stage, where we will be forced to change. We will have to accept that we will need to do things radically differently. That is the call to action. Nature’s revival cannot be treated as a decorative addition to farming policy, postponed until conditions are easier. It must shape how we grow food, manage land, invest public money and protect the people most exposed to rising prices and disruption. Standing still is not neutral. It is a decision to let vulnerability deepen.

We know the problems. We know the solutions.

The politics of driving change forwards is more difficult than most people want to acknowledge. The task now is to make that change unavoidable, not by waiting for the next crisis, but by choosing resilience, diversity and nature now.

Tim Benton is Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds, with expertise in ecology, climate change and food security. His work explores how food systems can become more sustainable and resilient in a rapidly changing.