Topic Advisory Groups

The LUNZ Hub has identified several critical topics which lie at the heart of land use’s journey to Net Zero. Exploration of these topics is driven by dedicated Topic Advisory Groups (TAGs) made up of experts and policy-makers from relevant disciplines from inside and outside the consortium.

These TAGs will identify and address the critical questions relating to each topic including the co-benefits, trade-offs and impacts on the wider environmental policy implicit in each one:

1. Soil Health and Carbon Dynamics

• Rethinking soil health: in its own right, what defines a healthy soil system?
• Soil monitoring: what tools, technologies and approaches do we need to enable consistent, reliable and joined-up measurement and reporting of soil systems?
• Rethinking soil management: how can we use multiscale and layered datasets to better prioritise practices that lock in carbon and reduce emissions?

2. Agricultural Systems

• What changes will enable different production systems to reduce emissions, as well as unintended impacts on biodiversity and important ecosystem services?
• Which emerging technologies for GHG removals represent pragmatic and viable solutions for different farming systems?
• What technologies and solutions for net zero work at different scales including when cost-benefits and trade-offs are assessed?
• What improved metrics are required for monitoring farm systems to identify pinch-points in business-as-usual for net zero, prioritisation of viable interventions and for identifying any unintended consequences of adaptation and transformation at farm, regional and national scales?

3. Land Use Change

• Drivers: What are the key present drivers of land use change, and how will they change in the medium and long term?
• Scenarios: what land use changes (including agri-system or nature-based solutions) are needed to meet net zero and our wider environmental and socio-economic goals at national and local levels?
• Policy: how can we improve the assessment of uncertainty in scenarios for policy makers?
• Decision support: how do we best use the complex socio-economic, biological and environmental data required in models to inform decision-making?

4. Green Finance

The Green Finance TAG will consist of experts specialising in a wide range of issues who can provide assessment of:

• The impact of policy changes on the risk of green projects and their attractiveness to investors,
• Green projects’ performance in absolute and relative terms (i.e., in comparison to non-green projects’ performance), as well as the quality of corporate commitments to green investing
• The determinants of corporate commitment to green investing, and the Informativeness of corporate reporting of companies impact on biodiversity, soil health, and other targets.

5. Digital Opportunities

The Digital opportunities TAG seeks to look into key challenges around:

• Understanding capabilities and mitigated risks for stakeholders in employing Artificial Intelligence.
• Investigating how multiple disruptive technologies can address net-zero challenges from effective land-use.
• Establishing the challenges that are barriers to adoption, implementing policy, or collecting evidence/data among diverse stakeholders.

6. Enabling on the Ground Transitions

This TAG aims to identify and understand the enablers of on the ground transition to net zero, and specifically how to:

• build a net zero literacy by strengthening the capacity of land managers, institutes and communities to access, understand, evaluate and utilise knowledge about net zero solutions. This will involve investigating: land manager cognitive skills and experiential learning and adviser/intermediary professional competencies.

• build confidence and trust in public policy and private sector mechanisms through enhanced governance, integrity, transparency, credible evidence (removing uncertainty).

• overcome lock- in (economic, cultural, knowledge) and asymmetric power relations that hold back opportunities for transition; and identify how to create appealing and resilient business models for land managers.

7.  Social Justice & Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

The Social Justice and EDI TAG will work to champion social justice and celebrate diversity throughout all LUNZ activities, communications, and internal Hub critiques of the evidence we present, by:

• Ensuring equality of regard in the spaces created across the different facets of the Hub.
• Aim to attract diverse people, thoughts and ideas, in a culture of inclusive and comfortable engagement for all, as is fundamental to the LUNZ Hub.
• Embedding EDI principles to cultivate a culture of curiosity, underpinned by encouragement of openness in discussion, transparency, listening and learning led by the Management Board, as a cultural cornerstone of the Hub.
• The first step in this process will be the production of an EDI Action plan, which will include inclusive approaches to Hub activities