The Net Zero Futures Platform: Workshop Co-developing pathways for transforming land use for net zero, nature and people

The LUNZ Hub Net Zero Futures Platform aims to work closely with stakeholders across the four nations of the UK to understand how pathways to net zero, nature and people can be aligned to regional contexts in order to deliver meaningful change. At the start of 2025, we achieved a big milestone in this project by working with stakeholders in each of the four nations to co-develop pathways for delivering on their nature and climate goals. From the rich discussions and material these sessions generated, the Net Zero Futures Platform team is producing narratives and quantified pathways that will be modelled to explore the impacts.

In January and February 2025, the Net Zero Futures platform conducted a series of two-day online workshops with attendees from across the land use and agriculture sector in each of the devolved nations, to co-create pathways towards land use for net zero, nature and people by 2050.The workshops used an iterative pathway development approach to first explore “extreme” proto-pathways, which then informed the development of a more balanced pathway for achieving multiple objectives. The pathways developed in the workshop will be modelled to evaluate the impacts, co-benefits and trade-offs of the pathways.

Over the course of the two days, a common pathway development framework was applied across the four UK nations to develop the pathways, allowing for both consideration of nation-specific needs and contexts, and for comparability and learning across the nations. The pathway development framework was designed based on the outputs and conclusions from the first workshop of the Net Zero Futures platform. It provides the broad structure for the ‘storylines’ that underline the pathways, differentiating pathways based on differing key principles and values.

Click here to read the full workshop report.