Policy Support

The LADSS team have recently been working on the following policy support projects:

Stocking Rates of Land Capability for Agriculture Classes (reports available soon)
- Estimating the stocking rate characteristics of groupings of Macaulay LCA classes in the regions of Scotland.
- Supplementary analysis of the stocking rate characteristics of the Phase 3 land defined by the WEAG-GIS project.
Redistributing Single Farm Payment: Options and Consequences - presentation at Knowledge Scotland event “A bright future for Scottish agriculture after CAP reform?” in Edinburgh on Friday 24 February. During the event, the JHI team took the opportunity to display the following posters highlighting current research activities: poster 1, poster 2, poster 3
Future CAP Payments - estimating the area potentially eligible for Single Farm Payment
Pack Inquiry Support - testing the LCA and LFA as a basis for Pillar I CAP payments
Estimating GHG Emissions – testing the feasibility of making annual estimates of GHG emissions from the land use change/forestry sector data from the Integrated Accounting and Control System
Analysis of SAF & JAC - using data from the Single Application Form to derive data to be used in the June Agricultural Census with colleagues from REAS-Statistics

A key development for the team has been participating in the EU FP7 project SMILE (Synergies in Multi-scale Inter-Linkages of Eco-Social Systems). Here we are applying Social Metabolism Approaches (SMA) to assess sustainability. SMA provides a rigorous, consistent and holistic overview of system performance underpinned by detailed indicators of the extent and intensity of resource use.