The Seventh Carbon Budget: recommendations for farming and land management

At the end of February, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) – the government’s expert adviser on climate change – published its Seventh Carbon Budget. There was wide coverage on national news, but this blog provides analysis mostly focused on its agricultural and land management recommendations.

The review below puts the CCC recommendations on agriculture and land use inventories into perspective. It points to areas where increasingly robust evidence on grassland sequestration and different thinking on commercial forestry could alter the projections, as has already been seen in peatland restoration ambitions.

The Seventh Carbon Budget reports the amount of greenhouse gases that the CCC estimates the UK can emit from within its borders between 2038 and 2042 whilst still being on track to reach net zero by 2050. The CCC must legally conduct this analysis for the government, and Parliament must vote whether to accept the budget by March 2026, at which point it will become legally binding for future governments. Alongside each carbon budget, the CCC publishes a pathway to achieve net zero, from present to 2050.

The Seventh Carbon Budget recommends limiting UK emissions, including the UK’s share of international aviation and shipping, to 535 MtCO2e over the period 2038 to 2042. This represents an 87% reduction in emissions compared to 1990 levels, and a 75% reduction on today’s emissions.

In the five years since the Sixth Carbon Budget, the CCC claims that the path to net zero is now much clearer. Despite the publicity around hydrogen, for example, 60% of the CCC’s ‘Balanced Pathway’ reduction is delivered by electrification and low-carbon electricity which is now the most promising option across the economy, including in industry. Heat pumps and electric vehicles feature heavily throughout the budget, with half of homes to be heated by heat pump by 2040, and 75% of cars and vans on the road electric.

Offshore wind is expected to grow sixfold by 2040, onshore wind to double, and solar capacity to more than quadruple compared to today – all underpinned by falling costs of production per MWh. The cheaper operational costs of electricity mean that the transition to net zero will deliver net savings by 2040, provided that is, the government rebalances the cost of electricity relative to gas. This forms the CCC’s headline policy recommendation to the government.

The steep declines in emissions from heating residential buildings, electricity supply, industry and surface transport means that by 2040, “aviation and agriculture will be the dominant sources of UK emissions”. Agriculture will represent 27% of total UK emissions in 2040, compared to 12% today, as other sectors decarbonise faster. This increasing proportion is despite the CCC recommending agriculture reduces its own emissions by 39% by 2040 (to 29.2 MtCO2e).

It is crucial to note that ‘agriculture’, in net zero policy, means the internationally agreed agriculture inventory which is a very specific set of emissions – those from soils, livestock, manures, crops and residues, land clearance and farm machinery used during cultivations. It does not include carbon sequestration on farmland, most energy used or generated on farms, nor the emissions from fertilisers before they reach the farm.

Note: The remainder of this blog uses capitalisation to distinguish the ‘Agriculture’ inventory from a typical understanding of farm emissions. The Land Use Change, Land Use and Forestry (LUCLUF) inventory, referred to as ‘Land Use’, accounts for sequestration gains and emission avoidance on land.

The Seventh Carbon Budget neatly suggests that carbon sequestration on land will balance out Agriculture’s emissions by 2050, together reaching net zero (see Figure 1). Authors of the report have assured the CLA that this outcome was serendipitous rather than planned, but it underscores that in the CCC’s eyes, the task for land managers is to ‘transform’ land use so woodland and peat can balance out Agriculture’s emissions.

The CCC model shows that 2038 will be the first year that land use becomes net negative (Figure 2), with rapidly accelerating sequestration rates after that as the woodland planted in the next decade matures.

According to the CCC, around a third of the emission reduction in Agriculture and Land Use by 2040 will come from reducing livestock numbers. That translates to a 27% reduction in cattle and sheep numbers by 2040, supported by a 25% reduction in meat consumption on 2019 levels, 5% productivity gains, and a potential Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to prevent offshoring. These reductions ‘release’ land across the country to host mixed broadleaf-conifer woodlands and peatland restoration. The CCC judge this as feasible as the reduction in herd size is comparable to the decrease between 1990 and 2010. 

Peatland restoration and management would deliver 17% of the emission reduction by 2040, energy crops 7%, woodland creation 4%, agroforestry and woodland 2%, and the rest from low-carbon farming practices, and decarbonising agricultural machinery (Figure 3). 

This would be an uncomfortable future for many readers, but buried deep in the report is a telling admission: “our measures represent a subset of land-based actions that can deliver for people, climate, and nature”. The CCC’s pathway only contains the actions that have enough peer-reviewed scientific evidence behind them to robustly quantify their emissions reduction or carbon sequestration potential.

The first results from studies of carbon removal through rotational and regenerative grazing in the UK are only just beginning to appear, but they are not yet incorporated into the pathway. Consequently, the CCC’s pathway is predicated on land sparing, tree planting, and peatland restoration. It contains significant gaps around how grassland could be managed to meet climate objectives, and deliver more holistically for nature, public nutrition, cultural heritage and rural communities. The CLA’s current work on net zero with branch committees will guide a robust response to the government on this topic. 

The other reason for the CCC’s recommendation to reduce the livestock herd is to reduce enteric methane. The CCC uses GWP100 to account for methane, rather than the more precise metric GWP*, because the government uses GWP100, following international reporting protocol. GWP100 ignores the cyclical decay of methane, overestimating its long-term warming contribution whilst underestimating its short-term warming contribution. GWP* is not a silver bullet. For example, the government could use GWP* but still cut livestock sector emissions, as this would achieve a rapid net cooling that could offset other parts of the economy in the short-term. However, it is concerning to see the CCC has not examined how its choice of accounting metric might set different trajectories for decarbonising Agriculture and Land Use.

The CCC does not sufficiently promote commercial forestry as much as the CLA would like. For biodiversity reasons, it has an aversion to large areas of commercial forestry, despite this being a key way to achieve carbon removal whilst minimising land take from agriculture. This is because conifers tend to be faster growing, can be harvested when sequestration rates slow down, their carbon locked up in timber for buildings, and the woodland area replanted. Given the UK imports 80% of its timber, commercial forestry seems surprisingly ignored.

Interestingly, the Seventh Carbon Budget has less ambitious targets on the scale of peatland restoration compared to the Sixth Carbon Budget (79% of upland peat restored by 2050 in CB7, compared to 100% by 2045 in CB6). This seems to reflect a maturing evidence base: the CCC has revised its previous overestimate of total peatland emissions.

Research the CCC commissioned into the monetary benefits of land-use transitions by 2050 finds that all modelled scenarios delivered an uplift in net social benefits, alongside some limited private benefits, in the region of £500 to £1500 per hectare. Whilst the CCC uses this to suggest non-agricultural land uses are more profitable societally than farming, another interpretation is that it represents unreasonably low prices for farm produce.

Overall, the CCC estimates that reaching net zero in Agriculture and Land Use will have a net cost of around £1.2bn a year from 2040 onwards across the UK (Figure 4), which it recommends that the government must fund. This is further evidence that spending budgets for agriculture must increase. 

The Seventh Carbon Budget does not contain many surprises for CLA members; much is very similar to the Sixth Carbon Budget, although beyond agriculture some uncertainties in technology are now reduced.

The CCC’s lack of attention to regenerative agriculture is frustrating, although arguably the issue here is the lack of a scientific research studies for the CCC to use, rather than their analysis. One challenge for the UK government will be working out how to pay, particularly for the farming and land management options where market solutions are not forthcoming at scale, and which will be a continual cost to the exchequer, unlike the electrification transition.