Land Journal October–November 2016

R I C S L A N DSTR A P L I N E J O U R N AL

Land Journal Head

T Here’s the deal How improving public access to land investment contracts can offer benefits in low-income countries PG. 20

Seeing the future

Click and collect

The lie of the land

Envisaging the London of 2035 with an interactive model

Quality address and street data can lead to huge savings

Scottish field sports “at risk” after recent policy reforms

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October/ November 2016

rics.org/journals

© Peter Cook

BRIDPORT WASTE MANAGEMENT & RECYCLING CENTRE On behalf of Dorset Waste Partnership and Dorset County Council, we acted as Lead Consultant and appointed and coordinated the design and assessment team. Planning consent was secured for this public project in the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

In addition, we: •

designed the scheme with Dorset Highways, IMA Transport Planning and Mitchell Eley Gould Architects •

were Landscape Architects, Ecologists and Environmental Coordinators •

reviewed alternative sites and advised on site selection •

prepared the Environmental Statement, Design and Access Statement, Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment and Ecological Impact Assessment •

prepared Visually Verifiable Montages and Computer Generated Images •

prepared Public Consultation materials and attended consultation events

We work in all sectors, including: •

Waste •

Minerals •

Health

•

Energy •

Infrastructure •

Public Realm

•

Water •

Commercial •

Leisure

•

Transport •

Residential •

Education

The Farm House Church Farm Business Park Corston Bath BA2 9AP 01225 876990 info@npaconsult.co.uk www.npaconsult.co.uk

C O NTENTS RI CS L AN D J OU RN AL

RI C S LAND JOUR NAL

RICS L A NDSTR A P L IN E JO U RNA L

Land Journal Author Author Standfirst

Head

T

contents

Here’s the deal How improving public access to land investment contracts offers benefits in low-income countries PG. 20

Seeing the future

Click and collect

Envisaging the London of 2035 with an interactive model

Quality address and street data can lead to huge savings

PG.

8 24

PG.

M A R C H /A P R I L 2 0 1 4

12

The lie of the land Scottish field sports “at risk” after recent policy reforms PG.

24

October/ November 2016

rics.org/journals

Images ©

Front cover: © Shutterstock

CO N TAC TS

4 From the chairmen

LAND JOURNAL

5 Update

Editor: Mike Swain

E mswain@rics.org

T +44 (0)20 7695 1595

Editorial team: James Kavanagh, Fiona Mannix, Tony Mulhall (Land Group) Land Journal is the journal of the Environment, Geomatics, Minerals and Waste, Planning and Development and Rural Professional Groups Advisory group: Tim Andrews (Stephenson Harwood LLP), Philip Leverton (College of Estate Management), Rob Yorke (rural chartered surveyor), Michael Rocks (Michael Rocks Surveying), Tim Woodward (rural chartered surveyor), Michael Birnie (Buccleuch Estates), Marion Payne-Bird (consultant), Frances Plimmer (FIG – The International Federation of Surveyors), Duncan Moss (Ordnance Survey), Kevin Biggs (Royal Bank of Scotland) The Land Journal is available on annual subscription. All enquiries from non-RICS members for institutional or company subscriptions should be directed to: Proquest – Online Institutional Access E sales@proquest.co.uk T +44 (0)1223 215512 for online subscriptions or SWETS Print Institutional Access E info@uk.swets.com T +44 (0)1235 857500 for print subscriptions To take out a personal subscription, members and non-members should contact licensing manager Louise Weale E lweale@rics.org

6 A thing of beauty

Alison Carroll and Kris Eley review the lessons learned from building an award-winning waste management centre in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

8 Seeing the future

A 3D interactive digital model of London can help overcome planning challenges, Jason Hawthorne explains

10 Recording Australia’s built environment

Dan Paull outlines an ambitious project to record what exists at every address in Australia

12 Click and collect

18 Reduced tillage

Dr Julia Cooper and Anne Liddon explore research on whether organic farmers can reduce tillage while minimising production losses

20 Here’s the deal

Improving public access to land investment contracts offers benefits in low-income countries, Sam Szoke-Burke writes

22 Saving protected species

A public consultation on licensing Great Crested Newts and other European protected species may end their exclusion, explains Valerie Fogleman

24 How the land lies

Julia Stoddart argues that the field sports community in Scotland has been left feeling at risk after recent policy changes

Research has predicted a net benefit of £202m by 2020 from address and street data that local authorities collect and maintain, reports Gayle Gander

14 What are you prepared to do?

Published by: Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Parliament Square, London SW1P 3AD T +44 (0)24 7686 8555 www.rics.org ISSN: ISSN 1754-9094 (Print) ISSN 1754-9108 (Online) Editorial and production manager: Toni Gill Sub-editor: Matthew Griffiths Designer: Nicola Skowronek Advertising: Emma Kennedy T +44(0)20 7871 5734 E emmak@wearesunday.com Design by: Redactive Media Group

Barry Gleeson and Martin Penney outline five major challenges in geo-enabling BIM

16 Mapping floods from space

Earth Observation satellites can be used to monitor areas hit by flooding, Dr Conor Cahalane, Dr Avril Behan and Dr Eugene McGovern report

Printed by: Page Bros

While every reasonable effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of all content in the journal, RICS will have no responsibility for any errors or omissions in the content. The views expressed in the journal are not necessarily those of RICS. RICS cannot accept any liability for any loss or damage suffered by any person as a result of the content and the opinions expressed in the journal, or by any person acting or refraining to act as a result of the material included in the journal. All rights in the journal, including full copyright or publishing right, content and design, are owned by RICS, except where otherwise described. Any dispute arising out of the journal is subject to the law and jurisdiction of England and Wales. Crown copyright material is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v1.0 for public sector information: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence

OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

3

RICS L A N D JO U RN A L

CH A I R M E N

FROM THE

CHAIRMEN RUR A L

Gerard

Smith FRICS

National Farmers’ Union (NFU) Cymru Environment & Rural Affairs Advisor Rachel Lewis-Davies spoke at our recent Royal Welsh Show breakfast about farmers’ wider role in the rural economy, in particular provision of ecosystem services, outlining how they can help mitigate flooding and be compensated. NFU President Meurig Raymond also stressed the need for continued support for food production and access to markets, while RICS launched its leaflet Post-Brexit rural Wales: Impact and potential opportunities (http://bit.ly/2bbtR5t).

The views of key stakeholders at the show were clear – land and farming businesses in the UK will face restructuring with short-term pressure on rents and land values. Our rural market survey for January to June shows demand for commercial farmland in particular falling, with very modest increases in supply.

Brexit uncertainty and global commodity prices continue to weigh on price growth; but land is still an attractive proposition and viewed as a safe haven, similar to gold, and the market continues to be underpinned by rollover money. Location, in particular, as well as the quality of property will still dictate price levels.

ENVI RON ME N T & RES O UR C E S

Stephen

McKenna Acting chair, MRICS

The board has continued to work on environment and minerals pathways and competencies to ensure the requirements have been met and that the wording is 4 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

consistent. The chair’s day in June looked at the issues of standards, regulation, the APC and the increasing harmonisation of international standards.

Looking ahead to the 6 October conference in Bristol, we have some excellent speakers lined up. Hugh Towns will update us on minerals and waste planning changes in Wales, Martin Ott will consider challenges and opportunities in the waste sector, Tim Troman will examine landowners’ responsibilities for abandoned mine entry audits – taking into account recent changes in insurance law – and Gerard Edwards will discuss mineral resource safeguarding, a key issue in an era of infrastructure investment.

Brexit may also feature in discussions; European directives implemented by UK government are part of the British legal system, but regulations are not, so there could be significant change in our field.

Ministers will have to decide whether to embed EU laws into UK legislation, or develop a distinctive policy agenda.

LAND & RESOURCES GLOBAL BOARD

Barney

Pilgrim FRICS

The inaugural meeting of the International Land Measurement Standards (ILMS) coalition at the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome in June featured an impressive range of participants.

It was inspiring to hear from professional surveyors in low- and middle-income countries such as Botswana, Ghana and Kenya about the critical importance of land issues. UN FAO was very generous in hosting the meeting. We made significant progress, and ILMS will now be a central part of the Land and Resources Global Board work over the next year.

The board is also looking into producing a global professional

standard on environmental impact assessment processes and formats, given that these can differ considerably according to region or country. This new standard should help RICS members in providing their clients with a consistent methodology and output.

GEOMAT I CS

Gordon

Johnston FRICS

Sir Francis Bacon wrote that “travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience”.

My own recent experience after the Brexit vote is of cutbacks on construction and delays to inward investment in UK infrastructure programmes; longer-term funding could also be under threat. So we must ensure we use the voice and status of RICS to promote the value of spatial data, standards and professional support for developments that generate benefits.

I frequently travel up and down the UK, and have seen that the transport networks are under pressure from increased use and ageing infrastructure. Such travel is often not a great experience, so it is important that the continued development and take-up of building information modelling, investment in developing national and international infrastructure projects and a long-term strategy involving surveyors, standards and spatial data all receive the necessary commitment.

The Global Geomatics Professional Group has a role in making that a reality.

Key elements will be how we attract new professionals and develop those who are recently qualified, manage our professional relationships as well as the technical challenges such as the ease of data interoperability between users and interested parties.

If the current geopolitical situation can lead to a clear understanding of the UK’s post-referendum relationship

RI CS LAND JO UR NAL

UPDATE with Europe and other countries, then construction projects and transport network developments will create a great experience, one that supports and benefits companies and individuals across the whole community. I hope that Francis Bacon would have approved.

PLA N N I N G & DEV E LO PME N T

Paul

Collins MRICS

The group held its annual conference in June, and three related proposals emerged from it.

The first was that there might be merit in ensuring greater compliance with the minimum percentage of affordable housing in local plan allocations – with a stress on the minimum. This would help determine land pricing rather than have developers overbidding for sites in the hope of negotiating the required percentage down.

The second was to introduce a dispute resolution mechanism, following a breakdown in negotiating section 106 agreements. This has been a successful approach in construction as well as in landlord and tenant disputes.

The third was the strongly shared view that viability appraisals under the National Planning Policy Framework must be ethically based, with clarity, transparency and objectivity being paramount. As a result, there may well be a new RICS standard issued, founded on the first three global RICS professional and ethical standards: the need to act with integrity, provide a high standard of service and work in a way that promotes trust in the profession.

One more thing: the board has often discussed member communication, and I have opened a new twitter account called ‘P&Dsurveyors’ @prczzz to try to build up news, comment, questions and ideas. Do please use it.

ILMS coalition inaugural meeting Twenty-four delegates from 12 nations took part in the inaugural meeting of the International Land Measurement (ILMS) coalition at the HQ of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome in June The ILMS are designed to improve land reporting efficiency and related economic development.

The coalition was joined by partner organisations such as the World Bank, Land Registry, Ordnance Survey International and the UN FAO, and it is working with stakeholders and other potential partner organisations towards establishing an ILMS Standards Setting Committee.

Key events will be the UN-Habitat conference in November, the World Bank annual conference on Land and Poverty in March 2017, and the International Federation of Surveyors’ (FIG) working week in Helsinki in May. An initial consultation draft of the ILMS is expected next summer. n http://bit.ly/28M3IYw

Conference appeal Gordon Johnston, Geomatics group chair, writes: “As we head towards autumn and the resumption of conferences, shows and CPD events, I am keen to hear from those of you who can invite, meet and engage with politicians and MPs at such meetings.

“Whether through your invitation or their own interests, how have you got them committed to your events? I am interested in your experiences.” n email gordon.johnston1@orange.net CLARIFICATION The image on p.6 of the March/April issue of Land Journal shows Telford Homes’ Icona towers in Stratford, east London, which is a policy-compliant, affordable-housing scheme that bears no relation to the rejected Parkhurst Road

Conference dates RICS Environment and Resource Conference, Bristol 6 October 2016 o www.rics.org/envandresources RICS Rural Conference Hexham 6 October 2016 Preston 17 November 2016 o www.rics.org/ruralconferences RICS Rural Mid-Session Conference SNH Battleby, Scotland 10 November 2016 While the ramifications of Brexit are yet to be fully understood, there have been talks about whether Scotland will remain in the EU or hold a second referendum on independence, and the Land Reform Act (Scotland) 2016 is also now being implemented. These and other issues will be covered at the conference.

RICS Party Walls Roadshow London 15 November 2016 Warrington 17 November 2016 o www.rics.org/partywallupdate RICS Telecoms Forum Conference, London 24 November 2016 The Digital Economy Bill, currently on its way through Parliament, has a section that aims to reform the Electronic Communications Code to meet the changing needs of the market.

The RICS Telecoms Forum Conference will give you a crucial update on where matters stand, future challenges and opportunities, how the sector is evolving and how you can be better prepared to mitigate risks to your clients’ business. o www.rics.org/telecomsconference RICS Rural Conference , Wales 6 December 2016 o www.rics.org/ruralconferences

development discussed in the article.

OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

5

RICS L A N D JO U RN A L

n The

centre is clad in Siberian larch to reduce its apparent bulk

WASTE

A thing of beauty

Alison Carroll and Kris Eley review the lessons learned from building an award-winning waste management centre in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

T

he Bridport Waste Management Centre (WMC) in Dorset has garnered a series of prizes, including a RIBA South West Award, as well as being highly commended in the RICS Awards South West.

Bridport sits in one of England’s 34 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), and its sensitive landscape has meant that the process of finding a suitable location for a waste management centre has proved difficult and contentious, taking some 20 years.

In its citation for the award, however, RIBA stated that the facility is “a bespoke, considered, ruggedly handsome building that elevates the type”, acknowledging that such facilities are usually among the “maligned building types” that “generally do not benefit from the design attention that their scale and visual presence would otherwise warrant”.

Development in AONBs The government’s national policies on land use planning are set out in the National Planning Policy Framework.

Paragraphs 115 and 116 of this contain policies on protected landscapes, including AONBs, and confirm that great weight should be given to conserving 6 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

landscape and scenic beauty. They also set out the need to refuse major developments unless exceptional circumstances apply and it can be demonstrated that the plans are in the public interest.

It says that “consideration of such applications should include an assessment of: b the need for the development, including any relevant national considerations, and the impact that permitting or refusing it would have on the local economy b the cost of, and scope for, developing elsewhere outside the designated area, or meeting the need for it in some other way b any detrimental effect on the environment, the landscape and recreational opportunities, and the extent to which that could be moderated.”

Despite this, AONBs are coming under increased pressure from unplanned, inappropriate development. The 2015 National Trust publication AONBs and development offered a series of case studies and identified shortcomings in the way planning policy is being applied.

One finding was that national policies and procedures need to be taken into account when making decisions in AONBs. Development need In the mid-1990s, it was recognised that

disposal space in the west of Dorset was in short supply as local landfills reached capacity and closed. The Landfill Directive (Directive 99/31/EC) also significantly reduced the amount of biodegradable municipal waste that could be landfilled.

As part of the Dorset Waste Strategy, a series of waste management centres was proposed at which smaller waste volumes could be bulked up and transferred to larger facilities. Bridport was identified as a location for one such WMC, and there was also a need for a new household recycling centre (HRC) for the town following the closure of the facilities at Bothenhampton landfill and a need to replace an inadequate temporary facility.

The lack of suitable facilities was resulting in waste collected in Bridport being delivered to remote landfills at considerable environmental and economic cost.

Key lesson: Development need AONBs are places in which people continue to live and work. Some development is justified in an AONB, such as the provision of essential infrastructure, but the case for it needs to be made robustly.

Alternative sites Significant environmental and policy constraints pertain across the area of search, including those that apply to the AONB as well as the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and Heritage Coast.

Bridport is located entirely inside the AONB and at least 10km from the nearest undesignated area; developing outside the AONB would not be sustainable.

There was also a need to meet the proximity principle and manage waste close to source. Providing separate HRC and WMC sites was considered as an option, but discounted because of the difficulty of finding not one but two suitable sites.

In 2009–10, 40 potential sites were reviewed, having been identified through previous alternative site assessments, public consultation and the preparation of the waste local plan. Property agents were contacted, the District Economic Development Team consulted and a local commercial property database searched.

These sites were reviewed against the locational criteria identified in Planning Policy Statement 10, Planning for Sustainable Waste Management, which applied at the time. Indicative layouts were then developed for seven sites, and further environmental assessments and consultations with the public and regulatory bodies were undertaken.

In considering the planning application, the Dorset AONB team was able to conclude that the Broomhills site was the best among those available. It was carefully selected to protect the character and quality of the AONB, the Heritage Coast and World Heritage Site, while providing accessibility and functionality. The facility is partly situated on brownfield land, a run-down plant nursery and farm adjacent to the A35, close to the town, and it has good highways links.

Key lesson: Alternative sites As a result of the extensive nature of AONBs, it is not always possible to locate development beyond their boundaries without additional environmental and economic effects.

Even once it has been established that a development has to take place in an AONB, there is still much that can be done to find the best available site(s) within its boundaries.

Effect on the environment Nicholas Pearson Associates was lead consultancy and designed the scheme, along with Dorset Highways, architects Mitchell Eley Gould and a team of environmental and transport consultants for the Dorset Waste Partnership and Dorset County Council. From the outset, the principles of sustainability were followed, with the aim of implementing a high-quality scheme that considered the needs of its users and was appropriate to the wider setting.

Images © Peter Cook/View Pictures

k The intention for the building was not to screen it but rather integrate it with the natural landscape, retaining existing trees and hedgerows and augmenting these with new planting The public side of the centre is open to all, with level access to the recycling containers and two canopy roofs. A biodiverse green roof covers the functional recycling areas, provides a welcome canopy and reduces the visual prominence of the roof line. The second canopy provides shelter and a photovoltaic and solar thermal array, which supply energy. The canopies also act as an acoustic baffle.

The working side is designed for ease of use with clear passage for large vehicles through the site. The waste transfer barn is also lined internally with soundproofing panels.

While the building is large, the design allows it to sit comfortably in the landscape, and the Siberian larch cladding helps to reduce the apparent bulk. Features such as the large tanks for fire suppression sprinklers are clad in the same way so the site does not become a sprawl of highly visible equipment.

The location also includes a Site of Nature Conservation Interest. The scheme made sustainable improvements to this to protect its special features, including wet, neutral grassland habitat, as well as enhancing public access. The landscape design retains existing trees and hedgerows and augments these with new native planting.

The intention was not to screen the building but rather to integrate it with and enhance the surrounding natural landscape. The landscape design also addresses hydrological issues through the addition of attenuation ponds and water cleansing, while the new hard landscape incorporates permeable paving in the public areas. This approach ensured that mitigation measures were embedded in the scheme rather than added as afterthoughts.

The scheme was completed on budget in time for opening in October 2015. Site operators continue to implement the landscape and ecological management plan and are responsible for ongoing site management and maintenance, such as the control of noise, dust, litter, pests, odour and fire.

The community sees this as a positive building in use and ambition. This is important because, as RIBA notes, this “is a public building, arguably visited more often by more people than other public buildings in the town”.

Key lesson: Effect on the environment The best way to minimise the adverse effects of any scheme is to draw on the knowledge and expertise of the whole team and embed mitigation measures into the scheme design.

Retrospective mitigation may solve one issue but can lead to others, and is a missed opportunity to create something outstanding. Seeking positive outcomes at the point of planning and designing a project is often the best way to secure planning and community support. C

Alison Carroll is an associate environmental planner at Nicholas Pearson Associates.

Kris Eley is a director at architects Mitchell Eley Gould. alison.carroll@npaconsult.co.uk ke@mitchelleleygould.co.uk

Related competencies include: Environmental assessment, Planning, Waste management

OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

7

RICS L A N D JO U RN A L

PLANNING

Jason Hawthorne explains how a 3D interactive digital model of London can help overcome planning challenges

Seeing the future

London’s skyline is changing at an astonishing rate. By 2035, it is probable that our views across the city will be very different, and that our leaders will be faced with some tough choices about the built environment.

Every week there is another news story about the 8 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

housing crisis faced by our capital city; at the same time, London’s skyline is shooting upwards. A recent report by the organisation New London Architecture and consultancy GL Hearn found there were more than 400 tall buildings in the pipeline for London.

But the race to the top is not without its controversies. This year, the Skyline Campaign and a number of architects called for a six-month moratorium on tall buildings in the capital to allow time for a city-wide debate.

3D digital model One way to help address these complex challenges is to use a digital model.

VUCITY is the first fully interactive 3D digital model of London. It currently covers 200 sq. km, including the boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Tower Hamlets, Westminster and the City of London, although we are expanding it at a rate of 5–8 sq. km a month.

It gives anyone involved in the London built environment a tool that can transform the planning and communication process around proposed and new developments and infrastructure projects.

The model has an accuracy level of 15cm, and includes up-to-date information on hundreds of thousands of

l VUCITY 3D interactive model of London in 2016

buildings and more than 1m trees. Using our city model, it is possible to overlay geographical information systems data, sightlines, London View Management Framework, transport links and sunlight paths to help planners understand developers’ proposals.

Users can view, zoom in on and rotate the model to get a macro view of London or the micro detail of one building.

The model also enables the addition of existing, proposed and consented developments.

As a borough-wide or London-wide tool, it can integrate demographic data to help plan for infrastructure and amenity provision, Images © VUCITY

RI CS LAND JO UR NAL

including schools, homes and hospitals. It can also overlay property prices through time and planned infrastructure, such as Crossrail 1 and 2. We can see at a macro level what investment is required, where and when.

Until now, we have relied on physical models and computer-generated imagery to help envisage the future.

VUCITY makes it easier to understand raw data, while by providing the option of visualising developments, it enables users to make better, more informed decisions.

VUCITY is a joint venture between digital communications agency Wagstaffs, 3D modelling agency Vertex Modelling and GIA, an independent firm of chartered surveyors, specialising in rights of light.

The latest features of VUCITY include: b existing, proposed and consented developments b accurate street-level camera points to create verified views b protected views under the London View Management Framework b daylight and sunlight studies b integration of data on demographics, traffic and pedestrian modelling b custom live data on transport, property, news, Twitter, weather and the environment b real-time transport overlays.

VUCITY can also gather data for other cities and represent them quickly.

The model will help residents to visualise what London could look like in the future, helping to secure public buy-in and informing the debate, both on individual developments and on a city-wide scale. For example, the facility identifies the tall building clusters in Canary Wharf, the City and around the Shard near London

k VUCITY 3D interactive model of London in 2035 Bridge. But are there other parts of London where such a cluster would be acceptable?

As London strives to build more homes to address the housing crisis, how will our transport infrastructure cope?

VUCITY can help visualise raw data in responding to these key questions.

Calls for a digital model of London are already mounting.

Lloyd Grossman, Chairman of the Heritage Alliance, Sir Laurie Magnus, Chairman of Historic England, and Sir Terry Farrell, architect, wrote an open letter in which they welcomed the London Assembly’s recent call for a publicly accessible 3D digital model of London’s skyline.

They were joined by New London Architecture, which urged mayor Sadiq Khan to commission a digital model of the capital in a bid to plan for its future.

Growing population A provocative report released earlier this year examined how we could house London’s growing population. Published by the mayor’s Design Advisory Group, The Good Growth Agenda says an extra 1.5m people will live in London by 2030 – the equivalent of adding the population of Birmingham to the capital’s existing population of 8.5m.

The report concludes that we will need to construct taller buildings and house people at higher densities.

The report also looks at how the city can grow while retaining the qualities that make it special. Achieving both will be a tough balancing act. Some 50,000 homes will have to be built annually for the next 20 years, while the equivalent of eight new Canary Wharfs will be needed to provide jobs. If not, residents will leave, quitting the capital for more affordable cities such as Bristol, Birmingham or Newcastle.

New development will have to take place in the context of existing buildings. Inevitably, the character of some areas will change. Higher-density housing around town centres and in outer London’s metroland is suggested by the report as one way to boost housing supply.

While this could prove controversial, digital visualisation could offer a better understanding of the plans. Grasping what a new development will look like, how it will fit the character of an area and the impact it will have on the local transport network is crucial to securing buy-in from the public.

VUCITY not only accurately shows the current built

environment but also allows users to toggle between existing, consented and proposed developments, showing the development pipeline in London and helping to establish what the future city might look like.

At its core, VUCITY helps us visualise large, complex data sets, making sense of them and so enabling us to make better informed decisions and devise solutions. By allowing London to be visualised in three dimensions and allowing digital data integration, VUCITY can shape future development and infrastructure planning.

VUCITY enables better debate and decision-making at all stages from tendering through planning, design and building to sales and marketing. Most critically, it will contribute to a better built environment for London’s population today and in the decades ahead. b Jason Hawthorne is MD of Wagstaffs jason@wagstaffsdesign.co.uk

Related competencies include Access and rights over land, Measurement of land and property, Planning

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9

RICS L A N D JO U RN A L

TE CH N O LO GY

Dan Paull outlines an ambitious project to record what exists at every address in Australia

Recording Australia’s built environment

A

ustralia’s national location information provider, PSMA Australia, is determined to record data about the country’s built environment. It is an enormous undertaking, given that Australia covers a land area of some 7.6 million sq. km – three-quarters the size of Europe and 32 times the size of the UK. To tackle this challenge, PSMA is applying emerging technologies to develop an initiative called Geoscape and address the problems of scale and scope.

Location intelligence has the potential to drive innovation across many sectors of the economy, from logistics and marketing to urban planning, emergency management and service delivery.

Most recently, the ability to visualise the built environment has enabled the development of a number of 3D city models that provide high-quality detail.

The desire for a greater level of detail and resolution has also seen the use of point cloud data, which is enabling the development of small-scale but high-resolution analytical models.

However, Australian models often record very specific and often quite small geographic areas, such as the central business districts of our major cities. There is relatively little information available for the rest of the continent.

While its population is small, Australia’s cities cover huge areas, with Melbourne being around the same size as London or Paris, and Perth covering the same area as Berlin. And although most of the population is found in the urban areas that sprawl along the coastline, we have a critical need for better information about the built environment in our remote communities to ensure that all Australians have access to the services and facilities they require. However, the costs associated with existing techniques for expanding the coverage of these models, 10 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

Figure 1 National coverage map Remote communities

Urban

Categories

Area

Population

Urban

41,723 sq. km

>90%

Rural balance 7,649,262

>10%

Remote 250 sq. km communities

>0.1%

as well as their ongoing maintenance, remain prohibitive.

PSMA’s remit PSMA Australia Limited is an unlisted public company owned by the country’s nine federal, state and territory governments, and was formed in 1993 to collate, transform and provide location data as national data sets. Completely self-funded, PSMA continues to provide a means for governments to collaborate on national geospatial matters under Australia’s federal system.

For more than 20 years, PSMA has been aggregating, standardising and providing high-quality national location-based data sets. These include fundamental information such as geocoded addresses, roads and transport data, land parcels and administrative boundaries.

In recent years, we have seen interest in and appreciation of this information extend well beyond the geospatial community. In 2016, the Australian government recognised its value to the

development of the digital economy and, via a commercial arrangement with PSMA, negotiated open access to two key data sets, the Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) and Administrative Boundaries. This means that Australia is now one of a handful of countries where geocoded addresses are openly available at no cost to the end user.

PSMA is currently leading the development of Geoscape, an initiative to record Australia’s observed built environment and anchor it in a reliable geospatial base. We are collaborating with Australian federal, state and territory data custodians and working with major technology suppliers including DigitalGlobe, which specialises in earth imagery, information for remote sensing and feature extraction.

Every address in Australia With the development of Geoscape, PSMA is seeking to provide a greater understanding of what is present, in terms of buildings, their attributes and land cover, at every address in Australia.

RI CS LAND JO UR NAL

The new data set will also include tree heights and record key features of the built environment such as roof materials, swimming pools and solar panels.

The key features of Geoscape are: b national coverage – it will record all buildings with roof areas over 9 sq. m in urban areas and 25 sq. m in rural areas. b the data set will be maintained on a regular basis so it depicts the built environment as it changes b linkages are included to other important geospatial reference data sets, including geocoded address, property boundary data and the transport network.

Geoscape will provide a comprehensive view of the location, distribution and characteristics of more than 15 million structures across Australia by combining the following technologies and techniques: b high-resolution satellite imagery b 3D analytical vector data set b short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral analysis b high-quality national foundation data b geo-integration b crowdsourcing b high-performance cloud computing b machine learning and automated feature extraction.

Geoscape uses Digital Globe’s WorldView-3 satellite-based sensors – a multi-payload, super-spectral, high-resolution commercial platform with 31cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24m multispectral resolution and 3.7m SWIR resolution – to collect up to 680,000 sq. km worth of data every day. PSMA is also applying Tomnod, DigitalGlobe’s crowdsourcing geospatial intelligence platform (www.tomnod.com), to help identify features such as swimming pools and solar panels. While Geoscape will provide similar data to small-scale 3D models, albeit at a lower accuracy level, its data sets are designed to support analytics at the continental level.

PSMA tested the Geoscape concept with a pilot in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood in August 2015, moving on to focus on the Adelaide region and covering some 16,000 sq. km. This phase included just under a million building footprints, with associated attributes and relationships.

Categorising a continent PSMA is now rolling out Geoscape across Australia to provide full coverage of the continent by the end of 2017. We will be applying three categories in relation to data quality and potential capture timelines. Each has been developed

k Geoscape looked at 16,000 sq. km in Adelaide, covering almost a million building footprints based on a number of factors, including the probability of factors such as flooding, population distribution, industrial or commercial activities and the ability to verify positional accuracy.

For the base release of Geoscape, regions with more precise data have been defined as “urban”, those with a lower risk value have been defined as “rural balance”, while the term “remote communities” is used to define areas of interest to record at high-quality attribution but low positional accuracy (see Figure 1). The urban category will cover more than 90% of the population.

Various digital elevation models (DEMs) and digital surface models will be used during the development and maintenance of Geoscape, and a national 30m DEM will be provided. It will be developed continually with an annual maintenance cycle, new attributes being added according to market need and data availability or recording options.

PSMA will provide geospatial data in a range of industry-standard formats and also enable access to aspatial data through web services that are Open Geospatial Consortium-compliant. The data set will offer insights that can be applied in different environments and in different software, thanks to links with PSMA’s national location data sets that extend the depth and power of Geoscape by using G-NAF and Administrative Boundaries.

Image © Shutterstock

As well as an Australian Information Industry Association innovation award, Geoscape won a Geospatial World Excellence Award in May and is attracting significant international attention. Many countries are interested in its potential to fill geospatial information gaps; in particular, it could support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – helping establish key economic infrastructure such as addressing and land registration systems – and improve humanitarian and natural disaster relief delivery. b

Dan Paull is Chief Executive Officer of PSMA dan.paull@psma.com.au

The Geoscape evaluation data set is available for download, providing a 25 sq. km area from the Adelaide phase that covers 25 suburbs as well as buildings with solar panels and properties with swimming pools www.psma.com.au/geoscape

Related competencies include GIS, Property records and information systems

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DATA

Research has predicted a net benefit of £202m by 2020 from address and street data that local authorities collect and maintain, reports Gayle Gander

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Click and collect ccurate spatial referencing is in the spotlight. At GeoPlace’s conference this year, the MP Matthew Hancock—more recently appointed Minister for Digital Culture by new Prime Minister Theresa May— endorsed the necessity for high-quality and accurate address data, stating that: “Addresses are invaluable to our economy and our public services.”

Frequently regarded as simply a list to allow post to be delivered, addresses are in reality essential to national data infrastructure. Everything that happens has a connection to a physical location, from waste management to flood relief, from service provision for vulnerable people to managing school admissions, from connecting utilities to underwriting insurance, or from planning street works to mobilising a fire crew to a block of flats.

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As Hancock said: “The challenge and the opportunity that lies ahead is to ensure that high-quality, precise address data anchors the UK’s digital economy and the transformation of our public services, and is used to improve the lives of the citizens we serve.”

Public-sector savings The work of local authorities is the foundation on which the country’s address system operates, as it is only they that have the power to change or to create and approve addresses.

GeoPlace has worked closely with councils for more than 16 years to develop a national address register. With 2m changes recorded every month, data maintenance is time-consuming and challenging. This level of change also demonstrates the importance of the service for local authorities, being indicative of high usage.

The financial benefits for councils of accessing addressing data through the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) have been well documented over the years. The following are just four highlights of individual projects or partnerships.

1. Eight local authorities in Wales have generated savings of over £850,000 by use of addressing. The authorities checked all 135,000 single-person discount claims for verification purposes.

The project cost around £145,000 to run and enabled savings of £1m, based on additional revenue; the average return across the seven authorities was £7 for every £1 spent. Importantly, this was achieved without any extra pressure on existing staff.

2. South Staffordshire Council has improved routing efficiencies using the Local Land and Property Gazetteer, which has been instrumental in contract savings of £380,000 per annum for at least the next seven years.

3. The London Borough of Bromley has made significant savings and service improvements. The project focused on re-engineered street cleaning work schedules, and has led to annual savings of £800,000. It has also resulted in a 50% increase in inspections to check on the quality of street cleaning 4. The Multi-Agency Incident Transfer project has reduced operational response times for emergency incidents and improved the quality and timeliness of incident data from more Image © iStock

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than four minutes per call to 16 seconds. In Wales, more than 300,000 calls are made each year to the three emergency services, meaning that there is potential to save in excess of 18,000 hours of control room staff time that has been spent telephoning other agencies.

However, up-to-date research on the potential for closer integration of address and street data across local government was not available until a few months ago – a previous study took place in 2006.

Cost–benefit research GeoPlace commissioned ConsultingWhere to undertake a wide-ranging cost–benefit evaluation of the impact of address and street data in local authorities, which the former company collates across England and Wales. The research outlines a number of benefits for local authorities, including: b reduced data duplication and integration b greater tax revenues b waste management route optimisation b using web services and addressing to reduce face-to-face and telephone contact.

The research also identifies how the data can underpin government policy initiatives such as the Troubled Families programme.

The research was informed by international comparative studies in Denmark and Australia, as well as by an examination of the political, economic, social, technological and legislative environments in which local government operates.

Individual custodians were also contacted via a questionnaire and invited to attend a workshop to test hypotheses, validate assumptions and provide ideas on how to overcome barriers to wider adoption.

The headline figure from the research is that there could be a net benefit of up to £202m by 2020 if better use is made of the address and street data that councils collect and maintain in England and Wales. Based on current rates of adoption, this represents a return on investment after discounting of 4:1.

The wide-ranging evaluation identified the potential of address and street data to optimise operations in most services that a council provides, in particular the following: b planning and development: neighbour notification, local plan revision, planning consultations, local land charges b highways and transport: streetworks planning/permits, optimising inspection routes, gritting, service interruption notices b revenue and benefits: identifying fraud, missing council tax or non-domestic rates collection b corporate services: strategic planning, executive dashboard, gathering evidence for decision-making, members support b social services: troubled families, home visits and neighbourhood analysis b street scene: reporting problems, graffiti, work order management, management reporting b property services: asset management, property purchases, neighbour notification, shared office space b environmental services: preventing illegal tipping, commercial premises licensing b customer services: identifying location, analysis of calls, improving customer relationship management, service interruption notices, opinion surveys b waste management: refuse collection, recycling, minimising landfill, garden and trade waste

“ Often viewed as just a list to

allow post to be delivered, addresses are in reality vital to national data infrastructure

b public safety: contingency planning, evacuation plans b education: student registration, school place allocation, school transport, catchment areas b electoral management: electoral roll management, polling district demarcation, polling station consolidation b public health: joint strategic needs assessment, drug and alcohol services, NHS liaison.

Building on the data GeoPlace and Ordnance Survey are taking Hancock’s challenge to “transform public services” seriously. We work with councils to encourage address linkages across all databases, and seek wider adoption of AddressBase in the public and commercial sectors to “improve the lives of the citizens we serve”.

Addresses are also vital in connecting people to the digital world. As Hancock said: “To verify your identity, register to vote, get a driving licence, buy broadband – the uses of addresses are countless, from our emergency services, welfare provision, social care, council tax charging, and fraud prevention.

The address is the point of reference that anchors people throughout these services and across geographical boundaries.”

These services can be linked across systems to provide a common view of a place or property through the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN), which Hancock described as: “The jewel at the heart of the addressing system. It links address data across a diverse range of systems and services.

The UPRN facilitates greater accuracy and immediate data sharing and matching – delivering better services and better outcomes for citizens.”

Through the PSMA, we have the mechanism to enable this data sharing across the public sector. Our next challenge is to demonstrate how government can use the data to provide public services efficiently and wisely. b Gayle Gander is Head of Marketing at GeoPlace LLP gayle.gander@geoplace.co.uk

Matthew Hancock’s speech to the GeoPlace conference is available at: http://bit.ly/1VEroT1 ConsultingWhere’s report, Cost Benefit Analysis of Address and Street Data for Local Authorities and Emergency Services in England and Wales, is available at: http://bit.ly/1UYjfI3

Related competencies include GIS, Planning, Property records and information systems

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BIM

What are you prepared to do?

Barry Gleeson and Martin Penney outline five major challenges in geo-enabling BIM

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ver the next five years, building information modelling (BIM) will drive not just transformation of the built environment but of the geospatial industry as well. Its successful implementation will depend on collaboration between all participants. The surveying profession therefore needs to be at the forefront of geo-enabling BIM. What are we prepared to do about it?

The vision for the government’s Digital Built Britain strategic plan is aligned with the rise of the Internet of Things, big data and a desire for smart cities, all underpinned by spatial context and geo-location. The geo-enabling of the internet – for example, with Google Maps or Bing Maps – and smart devices has taken place over the last five years.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs and commercial ventures such as Uber are

Accuracy

Figure 1 The influence of the internet on the graphical interface for users

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exploiting the maturity of the digital revolution in communications and commerce – mobile devices, user reviews and ratings, payment systems – by simply geo-enabling. Five years ago Uber was worth nothing; today, it is worth more than £50bn.

As a partner of the UK BIM Task Group, Survey4BIM – an open collective of geospatial professionals – has been looking at what it means to geo-enable BIM. It has identified five challenges: accuracy, metadata, interoperability, level of detail and generalisation.

These challenges are the building blocks for geo-enabling BIM Level 2. The benefits are clear: avoiding risk, reworking, delay, extra costs and clashes. We have assessed each of these building blocks in three ways.

First, what is the maturity of each process in the context of UK BIM, rather than just geospatially? Second, where should it be to enable Level 2? Third, where on the BIM road map should this maturity be available?

2015 >1bn users

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Positional accuracy could be driven entirely by geospatial experts. BIM presents the broader challenge of design accuracy, but if it were handled in the same way as built accuracies and was adapted for construction or fabrication tolerances, a solution could be found.

Merging data sets of different accuracies or files with varying elements of differing accuracy is something that the surveying profession has managed for centuries in the printed world. However, a digital workflow can accommodate the maths and the complications of combining various accuracies and tolerances, allowing them to be interpreted consistently and dynamically as data is combined. For measurement science, there is no single

source of truth – only our best estimate, resulting from a controlled combination of multiple sources of spatial information.

Interoperability Regardless of the differing software formats, two fundamental issues arise: 1. handling of grids and spatial reference 2. interchange between formats.

These issues continue to undermine geospatial geometry, accuracy, level of detail and even information content.

Surveyors are well versed in these already. For example, when setting out infrastructure works, designs can have been developed in multiple specialised software types and on many different grids depending on the extent and how spatial coordination was managed.

This example is made more critical as, increasingly, the information with which they are presented is digital but not readily consumable in survey instruments.

Yet digital design information is automatically perceived as being correct and interpretable, which highlights the difference between the perception and validity of design data in the real world and as-constructed geospatial context.

Resolving this discrepancy could lead to significant efficiencies. How many BIM projects have stalled because two data sets have coordinate systems that do not sit readily together, and the new owners lack the tools to resolve the issue? Of greater concern is how many times these differences might have been handled inappropriately and gone unqualified.

Another example of this type of risk is the matching of postcodes to point locations. In the UK, some postcodes can represent 80 sq. km in area, which may be perfectly suitable for certain purposes Image: iStock

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they will go away. One of the key goals of BIM UK is to become an exporter of these services, to keep our knowledge and expertise aligned and current in an international context.

Figure 2 Maturity levels of the big five based on the standard maturity model UK BIM now Metadata geo-enabled Accuracy geo-enabled

Where we should be Level of detail geo-enabled Interoperability geo-enabled

Stage 3: Welldefined

Generalisation geo-enabled Level of detail Interoperability Generalisation Accuracy Metadata

Stage 1: Initial– chaotic

Stage 2: Managed– tracked

Stage 4: Quantitatively managed

Stage 5: Optimising Processes continuously improving

Processes measured and controlled

Processes characterised for the organisation

Processes characterised for projects, often reactively

Processes unpredictable and poorly controlled

but may be interpreted as a single-point location solution in a satnav or a mobile phone; although assumed postcode locations are not necessarily interoperable with point location. If location were required for an emergency call-out, the consequences could be costly in terms of time or even human life.

Metadata In a geospatial context, legends, standards and attributes are all commonplace. But digital metadata standards are less well known and understood. Here, geographical information systems (GIS) take a lead, but in BIM and computer-aided design (CAD), element metadata is still underdeveloped.

Metadata can help resolve challenges relating to accuracy, interoperability and level of detail, but in a data-driven world it also requires its own dedicated support for geospatial definition.

Many groups, such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, are working to upgrade metadata standards such as GEMINI 2.3. The UK geospatial sector needs to be more involved and broaden the discussion to support BIM and element metadata. CAD, GIS and computer-generated imagery professionals need to cooperate on an holistic solution.

Level of detail Level of detail seems highly developed in many countries, and in BIM terms, yet it continues to fall down on an as-built basis. You can define all the levels of detail you want in a design concept, but

Generalisation The generalisation issue presents one of the most difficult challenges and yet one of the most exciting. The London Underground rent map produced by the Thrillist website is a practical example of what geo-enabled BIM can do.

This map helps the viewer decide where they can afford to live in the capital by applying rental values to the tube network, with each route open to individual interrogation to produce a long section comparing location and cost.

What’s next?

Commercial ventures such as Uber are exploiting the maturity of the digital revolution in communications and commerce by simply geo-enabling if a need arises to map underground utilities, for instance, without the freedom to expose and analyse them fully, then an approach different to level of detail is required. PAS 128 is one valiant effort in the utilities field to provide guidance and solutions, but is not entirely BIM-ready when it comes to level of detail.

The acronym “LoD” continues to evolve, being used with different meanings and therefore outcomes. LoD is starting to be expanded as “level of definition” – a combination of the level of graphic representation and the level of information.

This can become very confusing, however, particularly where one aspect develops out of sync with the other.

There is also the challenge of comprehensive approaches developing independently in different countries, for example by the American Institute of Architects. We cannot afford to ignore these differences in the UK or hope

By mapping out the maturity levels of the applications of geo-enabled data in stages and relating them to the BIM road map, we can clearly identify where the opportunities for development lie and, in so doing, focus on what actions we need to take as a professional community.

It must be remembered these challenges are viewed in the context of applying BIM in the UK as a whole, as opposed to the UK geospatial sector alone. Applying this staged process of adoption to a BIM road map helps to clarify the gaps, and the steps necessary to achieve BIM Level 2.

The next step is to see on which actions the geospatial industry can focus, and which to prioritise. We have a chance to geo-enable BIM over the next five years. We hope you will be part of this. b

Barry Gleeson and Martin Penney are Vice-Chair and Secretary at Survey4BIM respectively. barry.gleeson@networkrail.co.uk martin.penney@technicsgroup.com www.bimtaskgroup.org/survey4bim

An earlier version of this article was published in the AGI Foresight Report 2020 and presented at the joint ICES South East and RICS seminar on 12 November 2015.

Related competencies include Analysis of client requirements, Building information modelling (BIM) management, Measurement of land and property

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Earth Observation satellites could monitor areas hit by flooding such as in Ireland 2 km recently, report Dr Conor Cahalane, Dr Avril Behan and Dr Eugene McGovern

December 2015 and January 2016 saw extensive flooding along the banks of the River Shannon in the Republic of Ireland, with Limerick, Athlone and Portumna particularly badly affected. The cost involved for infrastructure repair and clean-up could reach €100m, while the cost to businesses and livelihoods is as yet unknown.

The unpredictability of flooding presents serious problems when attempting to devise management strategies, and accurate, regular mapping and monitoring is therefore vital.

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Planning for flood defences, drainage works and possible relocations requires extensive surveying and mapping.

Gaining daily access to tens of thousands of properties along the Shannon river catchment for monitoring is not possible in this time frame using conventional ground survey methods, and although aerial platforms can survey large areas quickly and efficiently, flights may be cancelled during bad weather.

However, a space-age alternative exists. A low-cost mapping technology that provides rapid, regular, extensive coverage is the current generation of Earth observation (EO) satellites.

Satellite imagery EO satellites broadly fall into two classes: those that record the sun’s energy reflected from the Earth’s surface, and those that transmit their own

energy and measure what comes back. These satellites can survey large strips during each orbit, with some capable of surveying areas the size of Leinster in just a few minutes.

Other satellites, such as the commercially available Worldview 3, focus on narrower strips, but can therefore provide imagery with a spatial resolution as low as 0.31 sq. m; each pixel therefore represents an area about the size of a box of cornflakes on the ground.

Imagery of the whole island is recorded every 10–15 days by the individual satellites, and geomatics surveyors can generate more frequent updates by using multiple satellites’ data. As platforms such as NASA’s Landsat have been operational since the mid-1980s, free archival imagery is also available.

A recent EO development of particular relevance is the

ongoing Sentinel project, organised by Copernicus.

This is an EU programme aimed at developing European information services from satellite data, implemented by the European Commission and with support from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Preliminary market estimates are that for every €1 invested in Copernicus by a member state, €7–10 is returned in economic value.

Sentinel-1a successfully entered orbit in April 2014, Sentinel-2a in July 2015, while Sentinel-1b is undergoing calibration and commissioning following its April 2016 launch.

Sentinel-1a is particularly suited for mapping cloudy western European countries such as Ireland and the UK. Unlike the optical systems that rely on sunlight and cloud-free days, Sentinel-1a is a synthetic aperture radar

Image: backdrop © GoogleEarth; flood polygons © Copernicus

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Mapping floods from space

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2016 DigitalGlobe Google 2016 DigitalGlobe

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m An SAR image of parts of Munster/Connaught and the Shannon River. Strong returns are bright, whereas weak returns, such as water, are dark. conditions worsened at the year’s end and into 2016.

Future events?

(SAR) satellite, meaning that it emits its own energy capable of penetrating cloud cover.

The resulting SAR imagery cannot be compared with the more familiar aerial orthophotography, as rather than colour photographs the resulting imagery is a measure of how much energy is scattered back to the sensor (see image, top). But these SAR images can be used for terrain mapping, classifying land cover, monitoring urban subsidence or deformation, flood mapping, tracking oil slicks and so on. Sentinel-2a is a multispectral satellite, which, although capable of producing colour imagery similar to aerial orthophotography (see image, above right), can also record information that the human eye cannot see, such as thermal or near-infrared energy.

Multispectral satellites can be used for mapping, land cover classification, urban planning, flood monitoring, assessing water quality, precision agriculture, forestry, mapping the sea bed and so on. Each Sentinel satellite produces around 1.7TB of free data each day.

Irish flooding In early December 2015, NASA’s Landsat 8 took some multispectral images, but the inundated regions in north Munster were completely

Government agencies and businesses should be conscious of the potential of satellite-derived spatial data for providing rapid, up-to-date mapping. If used properly, it can enable a changing situation to be closely monitored and then mitigation measures developed.

Archival satellite imagery can be used for assessing performance during the management of past events, planning flood defences or redefining flood plains for county development plans, enabling effective use of public funding.

Other applications such as coastal defence, seabed mapping, precision agriculture, forestry, geology, fishery protection, climate monitoring, urban deformation monitoring and biodiversity protection can all benefit from satellite imagery as well. b

k A true-colour satellite image of Limerick, which required cloud-free conditions obscured by cloud cover, and it was not until 24 December that a gap in the clouds coincided with another overpass by the satellite, which was then able to record flooding patterns. SAR satellites such as Sentinel-1a are therefore essential to penetrate cloud.

By measuring the strength of the energy that returns to the satellite, SAR assists with the automatic identification of water and delineation of flood boundaries to measure the flood extents.

This data can also be combined with pre-event colour imagery to help with visualisation and – because a single satellite is rarely sufficient for monitoring major flood events –

geomatics surveyors can incorporate data from multiple satellites. Data from two SAR satellites on 10 and 13 December was combined to delineate flooded areas in Limerick, as shown in the main image (above left).

The Copernicus Emergency Services programme can provide regular, localised geospatial data derived from multiple satellites, free of charge to all involved in crisis management. Mapping for the 2015 event from 8 December is freely available for specific locations in Ireland (activation code EMSR149), with satellite-derived polygons provided on a daily basis.

Similar activations were in place for Cumbria (EMSR147) throughout December 2015 and activations were set in place for other locations in England (EMSR150) as

Dr Conor Cahalane FSCSI, FRICS conor.cahalane@nuim.ie.

Dr Avril Behan FSCSI, FRICS avril.behan@dit.ie Dr Eugene McGovern FSCSI, FRICS eugene.mcgovern@dit.ie

The authors are members of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland Geomatics Division Working Group on Remote Sensing and Earth Observation.

This is an updated version of an article that first appeared in the Surveyors Journal (vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 2016).

Related competencies include Environmental assessment, Remote sensing and photogrammetry, Spatial data capture and presentation (advanced mapping)

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O R GA N I C FA R M I N G

Dr Julia Cooper and Anne Liddon explore research on whether organic farmers can reduce tillage while minimising losses in production

Reduced tillage

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educed tillage is promoted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as a key means to improve sustainability and make more efficient use of natural resources, particularly where soils are fragile and prone to degradation.

But concerns about nutrient supply, soil structure and weeds have meant that uptake in the organic sector has been slow in most European countries. Researchers from the TILMAN-ORG project therefore set out to investigate the possibilities for reducing tillage in organic systems while minimising production losses.

The project considered published and unpublished research comparing deep or shallow – that is, less than 25cm – inversion tillage, in which the soil surface and any residues are completely buried, usually with a mouldboard plough, with various categories of reduced tillage under organic systems, in terms of crop yields, weeds and soil carbon. The aim was to identify optimal practices to ensure maximum yield and carbon stocks while discouraging weeds.

Yields Perhaps the most significant findings for organic farmers were that, although weeds do flourish more readily with reduced tillage – in general there is an increase of 50% across systems – this does not necessarily result in reduced yield.

Across the different systems, reducing tillage intensity cut yields by an average of 7.6% compared with deep inversion tillage. Adopting shallow non-inversion tillage – which is less than 10cm deep – instead of deep mouldboard ploughing had the lowest impact on yields, with reductions being insignificant, but deeper non-inversion tillage up to 25cm down resulted in the largest yield reduction. Shallower inversion tillage, at less than 25cm deep, also resulted in minimal yield reductions at only 5.5%, with significantly higher soil carbon and better weed control, and this may be the best option for organic farmers wanting to improve soil while minimising the impact on yield.

There seems to be no benefit, however, to double-layer ploughing – that is, surface soil inversion and deep soil loosening in one pass – which resulted in yields, weed incidence and soil carbon stocks similar to those of the shallow inversion treatments.

Reduced tillage concentrates weed seeds in surface soils, allowing readier germination and emergence. Organic farmers 18 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

k Evidence of active soil life and good soil structure in a conventionally managed no-till field in Lincolnshire who traditionally used deep tillage to control weeds need to develop alternative approaches to implement minimum till successfully. In Europe and North America, innovative farmers and researchers are designing systems that rely on well-planned and diversified crop rotations, including cover crops to suppress weeds. These systems use mechanical methods of cover crop destruction such as roller crimpers or sickle bar mowers and no till-drilling equipment. In some cases, a preceding cover crop of rye can almost completely eliminate weeds in a subsequent crop. These systems can be effective for annual weeds, but control of perennials remains challenging.

Combinable crops Different crops may vary in how appropriate they are for reduced till cultivation. In the study, combinable crops such as wheat and maize suffered the greatest reductions in yield, and this was particularly pronounced under deep non-inversion tillage, with a 13.5% drop in yield.

Cereal yields may be limited by previous crop residues that make it difficult to establish the new crop and also create a potential disease reservoir. Yield reduction for non-combinable crops – potatoes and carrots were considered in this study – was only 6%, but the practices are different. While depth of tillage may be Images © Dr Julia Cooper

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n Drilling barley in the minimum-till plots in Newcastle University’s long-term organic versus conventional cropping systems trial shallower at primary tillage stage, there are several subsequent operations, including roto-tilling before planting and ridging as many as three times during growth. These could result in conditions that reduce weed incidence and minimise yield reduction.

Tillage does, of course, perform functions beyond weed control in organic farming. It may be used to incorporate organic residues, green manures and herbal leys to enable more rapid mineralisation and make nutrients accessible to the crop. It may also help to reduce soil-borne pests and pathogen loads.

Implementing reduced tillage may be more challenging than in conventional production because of delayed and limited mineralisation of nutrients from organic matter and lack of synthetic fertilisers.

Strategic tillage In both conventional and organic systems, the use of “strategic tillage” at critical stages in the rotation may provide an effective strategy to manage pernicious weeds and residue-borne crop disease, but it does need to be balanced against potential negative impacts on soil quality and structure.

Any tillage may redistribute carbon gains to greater depths and disturb the biopores formed by roots and earthworms, potentially negating any gains. Temporary shallow inversion tillage may be a good compromise as there do seem to be carbon gains in this system compared to deep inversion ploughing, with improved weed control. By confining any ploughing to dry periods, in which vertically burrowing earthworms work their way into the subsoil, the negative effects may be further reduced.

In conventional farming, reduced tillage’s impact on crop yields can vary according to climate, rotation and soil type, but researchers found a trend towards lower yields when either deep or shallow non-inversion tillage was used on light soils, possibly reflecting the difficulty of building good soil structure.

Light, sandy soils lack the fine particles that are necessary to form organo-mineral complexes and are also significantly lower in earthworm populations. Without regular tillage, such soils can slump and become more compacted than loamy or clayey soils.

Carbon stocks are of particular interest in the context of ecosystem service provision. Research on carbon stocks under no-till systems has generally shown an increased concentration in surface soil, but this may be misleading. Soil can become stratified without tillage so lower levels have less carbon while upper levels have more, but with no change in overall carbon.

Organic practices can, however, enhance carbon with the input of ley crops and manure or compost, so combining these

“ The aim was to identify optimal practices to ensure maximum yield and carbon stocks while discouraging weeds

with no-till could result in enhanced surface concentration of carbon and potentially greater total carbon stocks.

There is also research showing that reduced tillage in organic systems can improve levels of organic carbon, microbial activity and soil structure. Soil microbial activity under organic reduced till or no-till systems is particularly important as it can contribute to improved root colonisation by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, leading to more efficient nutrient cycling. This strategy could improve nutrient supply and enhance yields in organic systems.

The TILMAN-ORG research showed that organic producers need not rule out use of reduced till. It does pose challenges but, by adopting a pragmatic and site-specific approach that includes the strategic employment of occasional shallow inversion tillage, it may be possible to realise the benefits of reduced tillage in organic systems without significant loss of yield. b Dr Julia Cooper is Lecturer in Soil Science at the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Newcastle University. julia.cooper@ncl.ac.uk Anne Liddon is Science Communications Manager at the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Newcastle University anne.liddon@ncl.ac.uk

The research was carried out under the framework of the TILMAN-ORG project (www.tilman-org.net) funded by CORE Organic II Funding Bodies, as partners of the FP7 ERANet (www.coreorganic2.org).

Related competencies include Agriculture, Management of the natural environment and landscape, Sustainability

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LAND

Here’s the deal Sam Szoke-Burke explains the benefits of improving public access to investment deals in low-income countries

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he last decade saw a spike in the acquisition of land in low-income countries by investors seeking to carry out agricultural or forestry projects. In many of these countries, agricultural and forestry concessions are granted through investment contracts between the government and the company. These are seldom made available to the public, despite their important implications for public policy.

In some circumstances, they can even change the way in which domestic laws apply to the investment.

OpenLandContracts.org is a new tool that makes agricultural and forestry contracts easier to access and understand. This offers a range benefits, including the encouragement of more sustainable land-use practices and fresh opportunities for public participation in decision-making on such investments.

Land-based investments and development Governments in low-income countries often view large-scale land-based investments, including in agriculture and forestry, as a potential vehicle for accelerating national development. Such investments are often framed as offering opportunities for job creation, increased public revenues, skills and technology transfers for local actors, improved infrastructure, and even, in the case of agricultural projects, the potential for increased food security.

Interested companies seek to capitalise on the cheap rent, guaranteed access to water and other negotiated 20 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

benefits that governments may offer.

Where possible, investors – including domestic companies and wealthy citizens, as well as foreign companies – may seek large tracts of land for such concessions, in order to maximise economies of scale and increase their profit margins.

While these opportunities may be attractive to investors and governments, the potential adverse impacts for stakeholders, and their subsequent effects, for local residents need to be taken properly into account.

Central to this risk is the question of land, which is the basis of livelihoods and culture for many rural residents of low-income countries, including subsistence farmers who grow crops on small plots of land, pastoralists who graze livestock, and nomadic and indigenous peoples who rely on lands, forests and waterways as sources of sustenance, medicine, income, culture and self-identity.

While such stakeholders’ land rights are often not formally recognised by the government, they may still have legitimate claims to the land that must be respected, as asserted in international documents such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security. Land can also be so intertwined with local residents’ social, spiritual and economic networks that it may not be possible to remedy such impacts adequately through the provision of money or replacement land.

These high stakes illustrate why deals to facilitate land-based investments

need public scrutiny and participation.

Yet in practice, the investment contracts tend to be negotiated in private. They cannot usually be accessed by the general public; neither, in some cases, by some government bodies charged with regulating such investments.

What are investment contracts?

These are agreements made between host governments and investors. In exchange for the government granting the right to access the land and invest for a given period of time, investors generally agree to pay land rents, and in some cases provide other benefits to the government or local communities.

Unlike a residential lease of the kind that a tenant may sign with the owner of a house or apartment building in which they wish to live, these contracts have the potential to alter how national laws apply to the investment. For example, governments may decide to offer tax holidays to attract investors, or even agree to freeze regulation at the point the contract is signed, so that any laws passed subsequently – whether they concern tax, environmental protection or even human rights – will not apply to the investor’s operations.

Transparency and the rule of law Investment contracts not only affect how countries pursue development, but also can undermine the integrity of their legal systems and democratic processes.

By excluding the public and the legislature from negotiations, the power

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of granting land concessions is effectively concentrated in the hands of small groups of, or individual, government representatives, who will not be subject to the usual checks and balances. This may not be a problem for a minister committed to soil quality management or sustainable timber harvesting; however, for a government representative charged with attracting large investments, the political victory of securing a large investment may be won at the cost of deals that undermine rather than augment the country’s development opportunities.

Negotiating contracts behind closed doors may also exclude valuable perspectives from other government agencies and departments, which could offer expertise on important issues such as resource management and environmental protection.

These concerns have led to calls for increased transparency around land deals, which governments are starting to heed. Notable efforts include the disclosure of agricultural and/or forestry contracts by the national governments of Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia. Sierra Leone has also committed, through the Open Government Partnership, to disclose 70% of its agricultural investment contracts.

Further efforts are needed to ensure the disclosure of contracts from a broader range of countries.

How to make contracts more accessible The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment has sought to build on government transparency commitments Image © Shutterstock

The recent surge in land investments includes some made in sugarcane plantations

by creating OpenLandContracts.org, the world’s first repository of publicly disclosed investment contracts in agriculture and forestry.

The site assembles publicly available contracts in a searchable database. This means that users in low-income countries can search by country, company or commodity type – for instance, oil palm or rubber – to see what deals their governments, or governments in other countries, have made.

The repository also seeks to make the contracts accessible to a wide range of users by providing plain language summaries of key environmental, social, operational and fiscal terms. These annotations often draw from different parts of the contract, making it easier for a user to acquaint themselves quickly with a contract and grasp complex issues without getting bogged down in confusing cross-references or having to flip between different pages. OpenLandContracts’s sister site, ResourceContracts.org, offers a similar repository for contracts regulating extractive industry projects.

Who benefits?

OpenLandContracts is designed for many different users.

For public bodies such as tax offices or environmental protection agencies, the task of monitoring an investment – already made difficult in some places by a lack of resources and/or limited capacity – can be further complicated if the investor’s obligations under the contract are not known. OpenLandContracts can bridge this knowledge gap.

Host governments can also use the resource to survey the practices of other countries and generate ideas for improving their contracts, for example by strengthening environmental protections or requiring more robust reporting from the investor.

OpenLandContracts offers governments the opportunity to use the site’s infrastructure to establish their own contract repositories. This would have the dual benefit of encouraging governments to disclose more contracts and providing them with a platform they can use for information provision and communication with constituents.

Increased transparency and accessibility can also help reduce community grievances. Enabling access and understanding of investment contracts can help manage people’s expectations and create opportunities

for communities to provide constructive comment on government practices.

Communities may also seek to monitor a company’s activities, which can complement government monitoring efforts while also strengthening community capacity.

Journalists are using the site as well to report on land deals, which leads to further scrutiny of land-based investments. Members of the press, alongside researchers and civil society representatives, can use the site to identify trends across contracts, gaining a deeper understanding of how such investments are being negotiated around the world and what opportunities exist to improve them.

Finally, investors can use OpenLandContracts to ensure responsible investments by identifying how other companies deal with issues such as environmental protection or preserving the traditional forest usage rights of indigenous peoples. In addition, the site can potentially act as a due diligence tool for companies that are planning to enter a new market for the first time.

Conclusion Transparency in itself will not solve the myriad challenges of land-based investments. But it is a vital means of ensuring that all stakeholders are better informed, which can enable more robust public dialogue and more inclusive participation in investment planning.

OpenLandContracts creates opportunities to alleviate some of the negative impacts that communities, citizens, and even governments stand to experience after large tracts of land have been signed away. C

Sam Szoke-Burke is a legal researcher at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a joint initiative of the Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. s.burke@columbia.edu

Related competencies include Access and rights over land, Cadastre and land management, Legal/regulatory compliance

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LICENSING

Saving protected species

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A public consultation on licensing Great Crested Newts and other European protected species may result in an end to their exclusion, says Valerie Fogleman

On 25 February, Natural England issued a public consultation on proposed policies for licensing development activities that affect species protected under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2010/490, as amended (the regulations).

A key aim of the regulations, which implement the Habitats Directive in England and Wales and to a more limited extent in Scotland, is to maintain or restore European protected species (EPS) to their “favourable conservation status”; that is, to the point that their natural range, distribution and populations are stable or increasing.

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The regulations protect EPS by, among other things, making it an offence to harm or kill them or to destroy their breeding sites. The protection is not absolute.

Regulation 53(9)(b) provides that Natural England, Natural Resources Wales or Scottish Natural Heritage may grant a licence only if the authority is satisfied that “there is no satisfactory alternative; and [the development] will not be detrimental to the maintenance of the population of the [relevant EPS] at a favourable conservation status in [its] natural range”.

Under Natural England’s standard practice and procedures, the developer proposes a programme of compensation and mitigation to reduce or offset any unavoidable harm to an EPS to ensure that the development is not detrimental to the conservation status of the EPS population.

Compensation measures include creating or improving

the compensatory habitat on or near the site, while mitigation measures include maintaining “a population of equivalent status [at the compensatory habitat]”. The purpose is to ensure there is “no net loss in the local population status of the [EPS], taking into account factors such as population size, viability and connectivity”.

Mitigation measures generally involve the exclusion of an affected EPS from the development site including trapping any animals that access the site and relocating them to the compensatory habitat. As Natural England has commented, however, the cost of excluding an EPS may be “much greater than the investment in the provision of compensatory habitat, even though the latter may present greater opportunity for benefits to the local population in the long term”.

Policy proposals The four policies proposed by Natural England are:

1. to shift the focus from protecting individual animals on a development site towards improving populations in the wider local area so as to reduce the requirement for the seasonally constrained work of trapping and relocating an EPS 2. to allow flexibility in the location of the compensatory habitat, enabling it to be situated away from a development site 3. to allow an EPS access to temporary habitats on development sites, such as mineral workings and brownfield sites, provided that the operator or developer enters into an agreement with Natural England to maintain the conservation status of the local EPS population during development activities and after their completion 4. to reduce the extent of an EPS survey when the impacts on an EPS can be predicted with confidence.

All four policies focus on Great Crested Newts, with

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the fourth also including bats.

The newts and bats are listed as EPS under the habitats directive due to a substantial decline in their numbers and distribution across the EU, including the UK. The decline has been caused especially by degradation of their habitat, ponds in particular, as a result of agricultural intensification, housing and general neglect, as well as fragmentation of habitat by roads, buildings and other structures.

Fragmentation threatens EPS with extinction due to their inability to migrate from the isolated area; the probability of isolated populations becoming extinct within 20 generations is more than 95%.

Great Crested Newts have the most stringent safeguards for any amphibian in the UK, being protected under Schedule 2 of the regulations and Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, as amended. A clash with mineral working and development was inevitable because the newts occupy water-filled pits in parts of, or former, mineral extraction sites as well as brownfield and other disused industrial sites.

The exclusion of Great Crested Newts from a development or mineral extraction site is usually achieved by installing amphibian fencing around the site and associated ponds, maintaining this, and ensuring that any newts discovered in pitfall traps, carpet tiles or other artificial refuges on the site are relocated outside the fencing. Generally speaking, relocation may only be carried out by the consultant ecologist named in the licence or their accredited agent.

Twin benefits Whereas brownfield sites often include piles of rubble and other debris and old walls, favoured by Great Crested Newts as habitat, development works Image © Shutterstock

themselves may create similar – and new – piles of rubble and debris. Excluding the newts from a development site is not, therefore, necessarily to the advantage of their local population because they cannot benefit from the habitat created by it.

Similarly, habitat in a mineral extraction site benefits, however temporarily, the newts’ local population.

Policy 3 has obvious financial benefits for mineral extraction companies and developers, in that the need to install and maintain exclusion fencing and capture and remove Great Crested Newts would be avoided. As the consultation notes, the policy also has long-term benefits for local populations of newts. Such benefits would be increased if

Rural Communities Act 2006 agreement with Natural England. The consultation observes that conservation covenants and other options may also be available in future.

The consultation, which closed on 7 April 2016, is sparse on measures to be taken when a mineral extraction or development site that has been temporarily used as Great Crested Newt habitat is worked for minerals or developed. A hypothetical case study for policy 3 involving a quarry merely states that a “bespoke licence enables damage and destruction of temporary habitats and incidental losses of G[reat] C[rested] N[ewts] as a result of the quarry working”.

More details will be essential to protect operators or developers who implement the

“ The probabiliy of isolated

populations becoming extinct within 20 generations is greater than 95%

on-site habitats used by them are not worked or developed for long periods of time.

The problem arises in the measures that the operator or developer must take when the newts have colonised an area that is then used for mineral extraction or development.

Natural England proposes that the operator or developer would not be required to carry out full compensation and mitigation measures at this stage; instead, a baseline for Great Crested Newt habitat would be agreed before the works began and the operator or developer would manage the site during its colonisation by the newts, with the result that their conservation status would be increased.

The developer could also enter into a section 106 agreement with the planning authority or a Natural Environment and

policy from potential sanctions or the implementation of expensive measures when they work or develop sites that have been colonised by the newts and other EPS, or which have increased populations.

Brexit does not obviate the need to continue research on this policy. The habitats directive will still apply to the UK for at least two years before England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each decide its future in their jurisdiction according, in part, to the UK’s commitments as parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and other nature conventions.

the 1990s. SHAs allow the landowner to destroy any additional habitat created after entering into an agreement, including the incidental loss of protected animals, provided the baseline condition of the site is retained. Implementation of the policy at federal and state level has resulted in the creation of additional habitat.

The Canadian province of Ontario has a similar policy, as do the Netherlands and Belgium where it is referred to as “temporary nature”, and is designed to allow pioneer or early species such as natterjack toads and common terns to inhabit part of a development site.

The concept recognises that, in time, species at the developed site will need to be removed. In the meantime, however, pioneer species will have colonised the site, followed by others as the ecology develops. Although the Natural England proposals focus mainly on Great Crested Newts, a review of the programmes in North America, the Netherlands and Belgium may provide valuable insights to enable its successful introduction and implementation. b Valerie Fogleman is Consultant at Stevens & Bolton LLP and Professor of Law at Cardiff University School of Law and Politics valerie.fogleman@ stevens-bolton.com

Natural England’s Proposed new policies for European Protected Species licensing: Public Consultation is available at http://bit.ly/2azReaG

Other countries The research could include a similar programme in the USA where landowners have entered into “safe harbour agreements” (SHAs) for temporary habitats since

Related competencies include Development appraisals, Management of the natural environment and landscape, Sustainability

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S C OTL A N D

Views expressed in this article are those of the Scottish Association for Country Sports

How the land lies Julia Stoddart explains how the field sports community in Scotland has been left feeling at risk after recent policy changes

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he political landscape in Scotland is markedly different to other parts of the UK. While there are some clear benefits in recent changes to some policy areas, the field sports community has been left feeling at risk. Relevant policy must be unbiased and based on evidence rather than on abstract ideology, and the Scottish Association for Country Sports (SACS) continues to drive and inform a balanced, logical dialogue with policymakers on behalf of our members. Education, evidence and exemplary behaviour by those in our community are essential.

Shooting rates Part 6 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 ends the exemption of “shootings and deer forests” from the valuation roll.

As of April 2017, rates will be charged on shooting and stalking rights. The assessors’ office is finalising the format of information-gathering forms, which will be sent out to proprietors to collect evidence for valuations.

As the assessors do not have an inherent understanding of the way the shooting world operates, they have sought guidance from SACS and other bodies. We understand that all rural land will be entered in the valuation roll, whether or not the rights are exercised, as it is the right itself that is valued.

Although the introduction of rates is unlikely to affect smaller shooting enterprises due to the scale of values and the availability of reliefs, larger enterprises will be affected, including diversified businesses, as reliefs are cumulative. The 24 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

potential negative impacts are severe, since large areas of rural Scotland revolve around the shooting community.

The Scottish government has not carried out a sustainability impact assessment on rates, despite its assertion that it is committed to supporting rural areas. If the enforcement of rates on shooting businesses that already operate on tight margins leads to the cessation of business and staff redundancies, then rural communities and tied local economies – as well as the vital conservation land management work carried out by gamekeepers – will suffer.

Wild fisheries reform The Scottish government has long sought to reform the old laws regulating salmonid fishing in Scotland. The public has been consulted on a draft National Wild Fisheries Strategy and Bill, which contains wide-ranging proposals on everything from enforcement action and rod licences to conservation plans and the replacement of salmon fishery boards with fishery management organisations.

The implications of the new proposals are likely to affect all riparian landowners, regardless of their interest in salmon.

The proposals will probably place a new burden on landowners and managers, who will have joint responsibility for the conservation status of their local waters.

Meanwhile, marine factors affecting migratory fish populations such as sea lice from commercial salmon farms, rising numbers of predatory birds and seals and the impact of large trawlers remain unaddressed by the Scottish government.

This still-developing area is one to watch.

Hunting with dogs The Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act 2002 regulates the use of dogs in the control of wild mammals such

as foxes. Earlier this year, the Scottish government engaged Lord Bonomy to carry out a review of the act, following accusations from anti-hunting interests that the law was regularly being flouted.

The act contains very specific exemptions that allow a full pack of hounds to be used to flush foxes, mink and other wild mammals by encouraging them to leave cover, as well as other exemptions including those for terrier work.

The review has serious implications for the control of pest species across Scotland, not least because there are far more foot packs than solely mounted hunts, which we believe are the main target of anti-hunting interests. There are areas where, due to topography, vegetation and proximity of human habitation, snaring or lamping – night shooting – of foxes is not possible.

In these circumstances, the use of hounds and terriers to work cover and flush quarry animals towards waiting guns or falconers is an essential pest control method. The Scottish government has indicated that it may wish to tighten up the law, but the current exemptions are proven to work well and the police report no problems. Land managers must have the ability to control pest species effectively, and the current review presents a threat to this ability.

Furthermore, if there is any significant restriction on the number of dogs permitted to flush a fox to guns, then shoot managers may have to be very

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careful about beaters flushing foxes on driven and rough days. SACS has submitted comprehensive written evidence to Lord Bonomy in support of the status quo, and at the time of writing awaits his report and recommendations.

Deer management Deer in Scotland are an iconic, keystone species, beloved of tourists and the field sports community alike, but they also serve as an erroneous symbol for the class war that has long been the driver of radical land reform. This symbolic status is erroneous inasmuch as deer are not the sole preserve of the rich and the landed; in fact, there are far more working people who are engaged in deer management in Scotland.

Conservation NGOs and others often claim that “there are too many deer in Scotland”, but this is a categorical untruth. In fact, there are areas of Scotland where deer are locally abundant, but there are areas where there are no deer at all thanks to the eradication policies of certain landowning bodies. In between, there are areas where deer exist in well-managed balance with their habitat.

Deer can represent both an asset, in terms of stalking and ecotourism value, and a liability, in terms of pressure from the government and anti-deer interests to keep densities at or below a certain level, as well as their potential impact on forestry interests. Proprietors of stalking Images © Shutterstock/iStock

rights are expected to play an active role in local deer management groups. A new threat is the government-commissioned Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) review of deer management in Scotland, which will, among other things, assess the effectiveness of voluntary schemes in protecting the public interest and especially natural heritage.

When this is viewed in the context of Part 8 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016, which gives SNH increased statutory powers over landowners who are not deemed to be managing deer in the public interest, along with the existing statutory powers in the Deer (Scotland) Act 1996, the future looks challenging for those who see deer as a vital part of the rural economy and environment. For those who view deer as a problem, increased statutory powers may be more welcome.

SACS is supporting deer managers who feel that their interests have become maligned in the face of those pursuing an ideological land reform agenda; for the Scottish government to call deer management “sustainable”, the voices of

deer proponents must be heard in balance with those of others.

Vicarious Liability Vicarious Liability was introduced by the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Act 2011, and in essence means that a landowner can be held responsible for the unlawful actions of an employee, for example, a keeper killing a protected raptor.

In practice, anyone who in a land management context is in a position to have prevented another from carrying out a wildlife crime could be deemed liable.

Most landowners are aware of this law, and have taken steps to ensure both that all employees or associated parties have been formally advised of it and that this education process has been recorded.

All landowners who control, or allow the control of, relevant pest species on their land should be aware of the General Licences. Issued in Scotland on an annual basis by Scottish Natural Heritage, there are 14 licences that allow “authorised persons” to deal with certain bird species OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

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S C OTL A N D

Deer in Scotland are an iconic, keystone species

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in ways that would otherwise be unlawful.

Of particular interest to most Scottish land managers are General Licences 1, 2 and 3, which concern lethal control, generally speaking for the purposes of conservation, protection of crops or livestock and protection of public health.

Licences 1–3 can be restricted by SNH for three or more years where it has cause to believe that wild birds have been killed other than in accordance with the licences. Usually, police evidence will inform SNH’s decision; there is a clear protocol for SNH to use its powers, which are published on its website. No land manager wants to lose the right to protect vulnerable bird species, crops or livestock, as this would represent a significant threat to both business and biodiversity.

SNH is also now conducting a review into General Licence target species. A stakeholder consultation will be used to gather views on species that currently or potentially require control, as SNH is required to ensure that the species list is accurate, relevant and fit for purpose.

Following the Moorland Forum’s recent Understanding Predation project, a government-funded research scheme in which land managers including keepers worked with scientists to collate and analyse evidence of predator–prey interactions, we anticipate that species such as raven and buzzard will be hot topics of discussion.

It is unlikely that these species will be entered on to the 2017 General Licences, but the fact that the discussion will happen is a sign of progress for land managers who find the actions of these birds more damaging than those that can be controlled under the current licences. Scottish land managers can engage directly with SNH on this matter by visiting the agency’s website, or via a relevant membership organisation such as SACS. Land managers who need to control pest species will also be concerned 26 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2016

about potential changes to snaring and trapping regulations. Snaring in Scotland is currently highly regulated: people using snares require an operator number from the police, which can be obtained only after they have passed an accredited snaring course. The Scottish government will review snaring legislation later this year, again in response to accusations by opponents of field sports who have been supported by some MSPs. When viewed against potential changes to the use of dogs to control pest species, the implications of further restrictions – or indeed an outright ban – on snaring are extremely worrying for land managers. There is also the threat of possible changes to Scottish trapping laws; the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards could potentially make the use of Fenn traps and body-grip traps unlawful, unless Scotland is granted a derogation for pest control purposes. The decision on this convoluted and opaque agreement has been postponed until 2018.

Rewilding The process of “rewilding” – an idea being driven by organisations that believe the absence of certain, long-extinct species has harmed Scotland’s ecosystems – is currently, in the field sports context, focusing on the reintroduction of beaver and lynx. Needless to say, there is a degree of animosity between proponents of rewilding and field sports interests.

There are two established beaver populations: one at Knapdale in Argyll, a government-authorised and funded trial reintroduction, and the other on Tayside, which was unlawful, although no prosecution has been sought by the government. The former population has remained relatively contained, while the latter has spread to a large catchment area and has led to considerable damage to farming interests as the beavers are destroying field drainage systems and trees.

Image © Shutterstock

The Scottish government has yet to decide whether the beavers are to be permitted to stay and, if so, whether they will receive full protection.

Currently, landowners may lawfully apply appropriate lethal control to beavers, a situation that they will no doubt wish to see continue given the scale of the economic and environmental damage that the rodents can cause. We expect the government to publish its decision within the next 12 months.

The Lynx UK Trust’s proposed trial reintroduction of Eurasian lynx to sites in Kielder and the Borders has been much in the news recently, though SNH has yet to receive a licence application, indicating that any reintroduction is unlikely to happen quickly. Many stakeholders have refused to engage with the trust’s consultation due to its methods, however; for example, a lack of reply was to be taken as tacit acceptance of the trial.

Most field sports interests do not support the proposed trial, as it has not been proven that any benefits will sufficiently mitigate the significant risks associated with the introduction of an apex predator to areas where the rural economy is based on game shooting, deer stalking and sheep farming. We understand that the trust will still pursue its objectives until SNH makes a decision on any licence application. C This is the first of a series of three articles on Scottish land management issues and policy.

Julia Stoddart MRICS is Head of Policy at SACS Scotland’s largest representative field sports advocacy body julia.stoddart@sacs.org.uk

Related competencies include Land use and diversification, Management of the natural environment and landscape, Sustainability

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