Policy paper

Landscape Recovery: round two

Updated 18 May 2023

This was published under the 2019 to 2022 Johnson Conservative government

Applies to England

You can apply for Landscape Recovery funding until midday on 21 September 2023. Read the Landscape Recovery guidance and how to apply.

Landscape Recovery is one of the 3 Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes, alongside the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship.

All 3 schemes will support farmers to deliver similar things – clean and plentiful water, thriving plants and wildlife, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and healthy soils – but each will do so in different ways.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship offer a menu of standards and options. Farmers can select those best suited to their holding and farming practices.

Landscape Recovery offers farmers and land managers the opportunity to co-design a bespoke agreement to produce environmental and climate goods across landscape scale projects.

Landscape Recovery projects will deliver a range of outcomes, with a focus on net zero, biodiversity and water quality.

Over time, Landscape Recovery projects will contribute to national priority policies, including:

• the government’s goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 as set out in the Net Zero Strategy and the Net Zero Growth Plan

• the 2030 species abundance target and other legally binding targets covering biodiversity, water quality and tree cover under the Environment Act 2021

• the government’s goal of delivering clean and plentiful water as set out in the Plan for Water
• the wider commitments and objectives for nature set out in the 25 Year Environment Plan and Environmental Improvement Plan, including bringing protected sites into favourable condition and protecting 30% of our land for nature through the Nature Recovery Network
• the Green Finance strategy, and the government’s aim to raise at least £500 million in private finance for nature’s recovery every year by 2027 and more than £1 billion a year by 2030

Overview

There are 4 main distinguishing features of the Landscape Recovery scheme:

1. Large-scale projects: the scheme is designed to deliver outcomes that require collaborative action across a big area, such as restoring ecological or hydrological function across a landscape.

2. Long-term public funding (for example for 20 years or longer): the scheme will support outcomes that take a long time to deliver, such as peatland restoration, woodland management, or habitat restoration.

3. Bespoke agreements: the scheme can fund activities that contribute to priority outcomes but are specific to the locality and so difficult to facilitate through other schemes.

4. Blended funding: the features above and the provision of development funding should enable projects to attract private investment.

Landscape Recovery projects will be selected in rounds, which will involve a competitive application process.

Round one launched in February 2022

This focused on species recovery and river restoration. The majority of the 22 projects selected for round one involve groups of land managers and farmers, including tenants, working together to deliver a range of environmental benefits across farmland and rural landscapes. You can find out more about the chosen projects at the Defra Farming Blog.

Round two launched on 18 May 2023

Landscape Recovery round two will focus on net zero, protected sites, and wildlife-rich habitat.

We aim to build on the success of the first round by supporting even more projects across the country to instigate large-scale, long-term positive environmental outcomes. Learning from round one has been used to develop and enhance the scheme design, and we will continue to learn over the coming years and improve the scheme wherever possible.

We have committed to launching a further round in 2024 and expect to continue to launch at least annual rounds in future years as we scale the scheme up. The focus areas for rounds one and two were chosen because Landscape Recovery is well-suited to help deliver significant progress towards our ambitious Environmental Improvement Plan targets in these areas, based on the distinguishing features of the scheme set out above.

Learning from rounds one and two will inform the focus of and selection criteria for future rounds.

Selection process and scheme phases

Landscape Recovery projects will be ambitious and they need to stand the test of time. The selection process has therefore been designed to identify the projects with the potential to deliver significant long-term impact, and to support them to secure long-term public and private funding so that they can get off the ground.

The key scheme phases include:

Competitive application process

Applications are assessed against criteria by a panel of experts. For round two the criteria will focus on the projects’ likely environmental and social impacts, especially in terms of the focal areas of net zero, protected sites and wildlife-rich habitat, their suitability and readiness for the scheme, consideration of food production, and value for money.

All farmers, landowners and land managers, including tenants, who can pull together a project of 500ha or larger are eligible to apply. Up to 25 of the highest scoring projects will be taken forward after this stage.

Award of project development funding to the chosen projects

This will enable them to complete any activities necessary to starting work on the ground, including land management planning, securing consents and permits, putting in place monitoring and evaluation plans, stakeholder engagement, and securing private funding.

Co-design of a bespoke implementation agreement with Defra

This is designed to support the long-term delivery of the project over 20 years or longer. To allow space for innovation, we are not prescribing the exact outcomes or actions we will fund.as we do in other schemes.

Instead, we will consider each project’s proposals on its individual merits and work with them to design a public funding agreement which aligns with private funding, focuses on our priority outcomes and helps provide sustainable funding streams to the project.

Some aspects of agreements will be standardised to enable us to scale the scheme up to more groups and landscapes in future.

Delivery of the landscape-scale vision on the ground will commence in the implementation phase

Our aim is that as many projects as possible will progress from project development to project implementation. If a project does not meet the requirements for further Landscape Recovery funding, we will work with them to see there are more appropriate alternative opportunities and support mechanisms. We ideally want to see all interested projects continuing to participate in a suitable scheme.

Full detail on the scheme phases can be found in the applicant guidance .

What we learned from round one

Overall round one has been very successful so far. The application process was oversubscribed, with 51 applications for the 15 places advertised from a range of projects across the country, the majority of which involved groups of farmers and land managers, including tenants, working together across landscapes.

We were so impressed with the quality of applications that we ended up offering places to 22 projects. Collectively these projects aim to create and enhance habitats from chalk streams and temperate rainforest to moorland and wetland, restore over 400 miles of rivers and protect and support at least 263 species, such as water vole, otter, pine marten, lapwing, great crested newt, European eel and marsh fritillary.

How we have improved the application process for round two

We are closely monitoring and evaluating every stage of the scheme to identify any areas where improvements can be made. We have made some incremental changes for the round two application process including:

• simplifying and clarifying the guidance based on feedback and questions from applicants in round one
• running a single competition for all projects, rather than different competitions for projects with different focuses, to make the process more straightforward for applicants and panellists
• simplifying and consolidating the criteria and introducing a criterion to assess how projects have considered their impact on food production
• removing the upper size limit on the scale of projects which can apply, to increase the potential impact per project and enable us to pilot how the scheme can work across larger landscapes

• introducing a cap on the project development grants, to ensure that the budget isn’t taken up by a small number of exceptionally large projects

• better aligning the information that we ask for at the application stage with the information we need to award grants to the chosen projects

Co-design priorities looking forward

As we support the round one projects through development and bring more projects into the scheme in round two, we want to continue to work closely with interested applicants and the chosen projects to refine and improve the scheme design.

Some of our key priorities include:

How the scheme design continues to be inclusive and accessible

We are considering how we can ensure the scheme design continues to be inclusive and accessible to a variety of projects, farmers and land managers as we roll out the scheme more widely.

In particular we are closely monitoring how the scheme works for tenants in light of the findings and recommendations of the Rock Review. Around half of the round one projects involve tenants so we will have plenty of opportunity to test the approach and identify any improvements that we can make.

We are also looking at what support projects need to develop an application and where farmers and land managers can access this support, to ensure we continue to have a good pipeline of projects in future.

How best to blend public funds and private investment

We are considering how to blend public funds and private investment to increase the total amount of money supporting nature’s recovery while allowing public funds to be used more strategically to support this aim.

We expect Landscape Recovery projects to be well positioned to deliver win-win outcomes for farmers, private organisations, the rural economy and the public by pooling resources to sustainably fund the most impactful and ambitious land-use interventions at scale.

We want to co-design implementation agreements which complement growing markets for ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration or improved water quality, and act as a catalyst for productive collaborations which require coordination between multiple parties.

As we develop an approach with the projects in rounds one and two, we will look to share information and case studies to help more farmers and land managers understand what joining the scheme could involve.

How to apply for round two

Applications for round two opened on 18 May 2023 and will close at midday on 21 September 2023. Read how to apply and the full applicant guidance .