Restoring a sustainable countryside

Economists, politicians, farmers, consumers and conservationists are all calling for drastic changes in agricultural policies. The current emphasis is on promoting agri–environment schemes, and recent work shows that, although some schemes can be beneficial, others generate negligible gains. An alternative is to combine carefully targeted agri–environment schemes with large-scale habitat restoration. Restoration provides the opportunity to deal with several problems simultaneously, such as sea-level rise, water-catchment protection and flood defence. Pioneering schemes are showing that such restoration is possible, and there is now the opportunity to carry such restoration out more widely.