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Natural Capital & Environmental Reviews

We can provide a holistic appraisal of the environmental opportunities and risks on your land.

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Natural Capital & Environmental Reviews

Natural Capital

Natural Capital Accounting

Throw a new light on potential revenue streams

Natural capital is a concept that has been gradually rising up the agenda in rural land management and agriculture over the past couple of years. It is a term used to describe those aspects of the natural world, such as rivers or woodland, that directly or indirectly produce value for people, because of the ‘ecosystem services’ that they deliver. These services could be provisioning services, such as timber production, regulating services such as carbon sequestration, or cultural services such as outdoor exercise and sports.

Producing a natural capital account provides a quantitative assessment and monetary valuation of different natural assets on your land, and the ecosystem services they provide. This could be used to help inform land management decisions, throw new light on potential revenue streams, or give you the baseline data you need to start accessing private markets for ecosystem services such as flood mitigation or carbon offsetting.

For anyone looking to the future of public or private funding for environmental management and farmland conservation, understanding this new concept and the opportunities it presents for farm businesses, estates and other rural enterprises, is vital. GSC Grays are monitoring the area closely and we have consultants ready to advise on Natural Capital assessments and emerging markets for ecosystem services.

Farm and land use reviews

Optimising your land use

With the UK’s exit from the EU and a new system of public support for agriculture in England on the horizon, the economics of farming are changing. Many farms will have to reconsider how they have farmed their land historically and look to new environmental schemes to access public funding. Some less productive land may not be able to deliver a good margin without subsidy and the new Environmental Land Management scheme could incentivise changes in land use or management to provide more ‘public goods’.

If you are considering how best to manage your land for the future, conducting a comprehensive review of your farm business and land use may be a valuable exercise. By reviewing land use and management across your farm or estate, our specialist team of environmental and farm consultants can provide recommendations on how to achieve the best returns from your land in the future by optimising the land use on each acre of your holding. Using your aspirations and goals for the future as our starting point, we can assess the suitability of the land for arable or livestock farming, woodland planting, habitat restoration or creation, or other diversification opportunities.

Regulations to prevent water and air pollution are also changing, and we expect them to continue to tighten over the coming years. To help you stay ahead of these changes, we can review the current pollution risks on your farm, identify areas for improvement, and advise on measures to address these. In some cases, we may also be able to help you access grant funding to support these measures.

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Carbon Audit

Carbon Auditing

A rigorous & reliable assessment of the emissions from your farm

The UK Government, the National Farmers Union, major retailers and hospitality businesses are amongst those who are pledging to work towards ‘net zero’ GHG emissions to address the threat of climate change. Emissions from agriculture are also increasingly coming under scrutiny from consumers who are worried about the impact of farming on the environment. Many farms and rural businesses have started to turn this consumer concern into an opportunity, by making their ‘green’ credentials a key selling point for their produce.

To prepare your business to adapt to these new pressures and opportunities, it is important to know how your farm fits in to the bigger picture. We can offer farm carbon audits for arable, livestock or mixed farm businesses, which will provide you with a rigorous and reliable assessment of the emissions from your farm.

A carbon audit provides useful information for environmental reporting, which is now required by many major retailers and dairies. Our detailed emissions reports can also help to identify potential efficiency savings within your livestock or arable enterprise and show how your carbon footprint compares to other farms of a similar size and type to yours.

We want to ensure that the carbon audits we provide are a useful tool for farmers to improve the sustainability of their business, both in terms of environmental impact and overall profitability. To achieve that, we will take the time to talk you through the results of your report, benchmark your results against others in your sector and identify measures that will help you to bring down your emissions and improve your accounts year on year.

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GSC Grays are experts in rural land and property. You can find all the information you need about the sectors that we specialise in, from estate agency to environmental management. We are here to help you to achieve your goals for your rural property, business, farm or estate, today and for generations to come.

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