Chief Scientist of the Environment Agency to open Agri-TechE’s New ‘NatureTech’ Conference

What is the opportunity for nature technology?

Ecosystem services. I have been developing our understanding of these since 2007, and if you read the recent update to the Government’s Environment Improvement Plan, you can see that these are now firmly embedded in government thinking. We also now have a system for funding farmers that is built around delivering public goods, which can incorporate private finance, giving us a real opportunity to help farmers recognise this potential income source.

If farmers are selling their services growing wheat for millers, can they also sell their services managing water for people in the catchment? Farmers have advisors who tell them how to grow high quality wheat. Do we have enough advisors to tell them how to produce high quality water? Frameworks like the Catchment Sensitive Farming Partnership exist, and we have some good data showing how much impact you can have across a catchment if farmers act on really tailored advice.

Around 70% of our land is farmed, and it’s not just providing the country with food. For example, farmers also own the water filtration system for everyone downstream of them, but at the moment, it can be really hard to give them any credit for it.

Some smart farmer cooperatives are already capitalising on this. They have worked directly with water companies to show they can prevent the need to strip nitrate from water themselves if farmers go the extra mile to stop nutrients from getting into the water in the first place.  The Environment Agency doesn’t need to be involved in that transaction, nor does the Government; it can be a private market.  But it only works if the farmers can demonstrate that they have done the work that benefits the company paying them. That is where new technology can come in.

Which nature technology developments are you most excited about?

The big thing for unlocking markets for ecosystem services is cheap, reliable information.  Some of that will be due to incredible advances in earth observation, including satellites and drones. The development that goes along with this is the ability to extract information from it. New modelling, which might use artificial intelligence, will be able to identify ancient river channels or high erosion sites from earth observations, for example.

The amount of information available to the farmers who want to make this part of their business will grow enormously. That’s really exciting because to get a grip on some of these more complex physical processes, like identifying where water is moving, or denitrification is happening, you do need to think ahead and plan using technology.

If farmers know how to generate positive environmental outcomes and have access to sensors that reliably send data back to demonstrate the services they provide in exchange for the payments they receive, suddenly this becomes mainstream. Once this happens, investment follows, including in a range of other technologies, from precision farming to robotics, and of course, technology-enabled nature-based solutions.

How is the Environment Agency using nature technology?

We’ve done a lot of science to better understand how catchments work at all scales.  We’ve developed free applications, such as the ALERT tool, to help farmers analyse their landscapes and reduce pollution.

We are also partnering with water companies on projects funded by the Ofwat innovation fund to investigate how artificial intelligence can make the impossible possible. Water catchments are so complex that it has previously been nearly impossible for a human to work out how to manage them in detail, but this “big data” problem is exactly the sort of thing that artificial intelligence is good at.

AI can create multiple versions of a catchment and try many different approaches until it produces a viable plan that could improve how water is managed in that area, which will make an observable difference. Usually, this would take a planner years of effort.  And if we want to use more nature-based solutions across catchments, which we are investigating, the level of complexity will go up again, so we will need all the help we can get.

So technology like this could be quite game-changing for people working across catchments, because people are much more likely to buy things when they know what they are getting. It can unlock new markets and opportunities, delivering positive results for farm businesses and nature alike.