The new government has a very full in-tray: inflation and high cost of living, a complex healthcare crisis, housing shortages and more. All of these are urgent problems – essential to tackle, and quickly. They’re still dwarfed by the creeping enormity of the climate and nature crises. “The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.” Nature is on the brink of collapse. The world is already 1.2 degrees over pre-industrial temperatures, and climate impacts are accelerating. We need to act to both mitigate our environmental impacts, and to adapt to those impacts.

Resilience is the ability to adapt to, or recover quickly from, change or adversity – and in a world where climate impacts are certain and geopolitical shocks likely, change and adversity are inevitable. Colleagues have written before about the importance of food resilience over food security – and the same is true for energy, water, housing and other aspects essential for thriving communities. Food security and energy security are often discussed, but this tends to be in terms of ‘snapping back’ after a shock, rather than creating a flexible, adaptable system that can anticipate and withstand shocks. The ‘security’ lens also tends to calcify existing patterns, ignoring the failings of that system, their power dynamics and who they serve.

Taking an explicitly resilience-focused approach to land is the new imperative. Land is the essential, foundational ingredient for solutions to the problems we face: we need land to produce food and energy, to build homes and ensure our water supply. Land is unusual in being both a source and sink of carbon emissions, as well as implicit in every other planetary boundary. How we use land is not only essential to mitigating our environmental impacts, but also how we can adapt to a new climate and nature reality.

But land is already ‘oversubscribed’ - existing government targets require additional land mass twice the size of Wales by 2050. This is why creating targets in the abstract and siloed by sector is unhelpful, because it avoids acknowledging the trade-offs and synergies required when space is finite. How do we make the most of land in the UK to ensure that we can meet our future food, housing, energy and infrastructure needs?

The answer is a Land Use Framework – one that embeds resilience into national and local decision making. We need an honest conversation about land use in the UK to be able to meet all our current and future needs – and a process to do so in a way that can withstand shocks like climate impacts and geopolitical disputes.

What would an effective Land Use Framework need? Multifunctionality is a critical component: since land can (and does) do many things at once, it is the best way to maximise the potential of land and cumulatively meet many targets. Putting solar panels on roofs, or adopting farming methods that produce food and sequester carbon and increase biodiversity helps minimise trade-offs and maximise outputs.

Multifunctionality also supports greater resilience. An essential part of resilience is diversity: for example, genetic diversity in crops increases resilience to pests and disease. The same is true in economics: farmers with diversified income streams are more resilient to market crashes. A landscape with greater diversity of land use – different types of farms, forests, waterways, towns, energy production – is more resilient to shocks. This is especially true if land use decisions are made with a resilience frame, considering what local communities need and what future risks are.

It’s the process of making decisions about land that is also vital to securing a resilient future, at all scales. Making this process transparent and accessible engages landowners / managers in decisions about how their own land use choices can contribute to national goals. For example, planting trees on farms can help reduce run-off in heavy rainfall, hold more water in the soil during drought, offer shade for livestock – and support biodiversity targets too. Involving citizens in the design of new housing developments ensures developers build the communities people want, with social infrastructure alongside green infrastructure like hedges, grasslands and wetlands. This not only supports people’s health, wellbeing and prosperity, but also future-proofs against climate impacts.

A Land Use Framework enables strategic decisions to be delivered at all scales, but there are some that need leadership from Westminster. Beyond a broad commitment to maintain current levels of food security, there are no food production or diet-related targets. We do not currently have a clear path to clean energy production in the UK, and what mix of wind, solar and bioenergy will be needed. These decisions have often been put off because they are difficult, both practically and politically – but citizens are engaged and understand the complexities far more than they are given credit for. Without a clear plan for a resilient UK, it’s harder to make balanced decisions at the regional and local levels.

Since the new government took office, we’ve seen important strides in rolling out renewable energy and changing planning to enable more housebuilding. These are exciting steps, but without a process to integrate them into a coherent framework, there’s a risk of making suboptimal decisions, conflict between sectors, and pushback from stakeholders and local communities. We need a process that holds the space for these considerations, layering different land uses to ensure resilience for the future. It may feel like a more measured approach for a government coming in with big ambitions – but it will be far more effective in delivering the missions in the long term.