Julien Étienne tells the story of the Fens—an engineered landscape that feeds the UK, and whose people are facing critical threats from climate change.
The threat of climate change to the food system is existential. Only if agricultural systems both become more resilient and drastically reduce their environmental footprint will they endure in the decades to come. Yet, attempts to enact such a transformation have mostly failed so far. It is still business-as-usual in the food system, albeit a concerned, worried-about-the-future business-as-usual.
Our inability to face the music on climate change and agriculture is undoubtedly a failure of governance. But there is plenty of foot-dragging on the ground, too. Why? It is hardly a problem of knowledge. Farmers are experiencing climate change more acutely than possibly any other profession except scientists who study it. There is denial for sure, but it is not just that: even farmers deeply worried about climate impacts are putting other needs and interests before scientists’ recommendations.
For 2 ½ years, Laura Stratford from the Greater Lincolnshire Food Partnership and I regularly gathered about 30 people to discuss the future of food in one of the country’s main breadbaskets: the East of England Fens, a reclaimed flood plain with the most fertile land in the UK. Participants in those discussions lived or worked there, or both. They were professionals from the private, public and third sectors. They were plugged in, in different ways, to regional and national discussions on land use, water management, food technology, soil health, food poverty, rural communities, flood risk and crisis management. We set up a safe space for them to discuss current and future challenges to food in the region and to devise ways to address them.
Short-lived governments seemed either clueless or complacent about it all.
They did not need convincing that the future of the place, its economy (which largely revolves around food) and its people was not assured. They all worried to some degree, though not necessarily for the same reasons. Meeting after meeting, their sense of worry appeared to grow. Throughout that period, there were floods, heatwaves, and droughts. Farmers’ costs increased rapidly. The pressure to keep food prices down intensified. Roads and flood defences were showing signs of increasing strain. Short-lived governments seemed either clueless or complacent about it all. Through discussions, participants became better aware of challenges some of them experienced directly, while others did not. At some point, researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research detailed for the group the foreseeable climate impacts for the Fens. Far from discounting them, more than one participant thought that “scientists probably underestimate the full scale of future climate change impacts on the Fens”.
Everyone seemed to see the writing on the wall.
The future they chose to work towards was bright nonetheless: more and better jobs, better infrastructures, healthier food, well-managed water, well-maintained soil, stronger communities, growth, rejuvenation, resilience, less poverty, and the nation’s commitment to protect the Fens.
The Environment Agency has hinted at staggering sums… to keep the Fens dry.
It is an understatement to call this horizon optimistic. The Environment Agency has hinted at the staggering sums that would need to be invested continuously to keep the Fens dry as extreme rainfall events multiply and sea levels continue to rise. Paradoxically, keeping the Fens wet enough for food production during extended droughts will also require significant investment in water storage. These unprecedented funding needs come at a time when demands on the public purse are projected to grow considerably, whether from other parts of the UK also threatened by climate change, the military, or the NHS. Among others, the archaeologist Francis Pryor (who lives in the Fens) and the climate scientist Bill McGuire conclude that the Fens will flood permanently.
Yet many participants assumed the challenges ahead were tractable. They could be managed if the powers that be were convinced to invest in protecting the Fens. Their collective experience spanned Westminster and local government, businesses and grass-roots organisations. Some had successfully made the case for public and private investment in the region. If it had been done before, it could be done again.
In hindsight, the whole process has felt like a dance… oscillating between pessimism and optimism.
One is reminded of Karl Weick’s retelling of two unmanageable wildfires in the US, during which firefighters declined to drop their heavy tools so they could run faster. Their tools had served them well in the past. They would not let go of them, even though, on that day, they were of no use and slowed them down. They did not survive. There lies an allegory for our times: do we expect to solve completely new challenges the same way we solved earlier ones, or can we think anew?
In hindsight, the whole process has felt like a dance, taking steps towards new ideas and then backtracking to old ones, oscillating between depths of pessimism and heights of optimism.
The participants’ eagerness to do something for this particular patch of land and its people, which they knew and were unmistakably attached to, made them somewhat defiant of the odds. Again, the past was a guide there, emerging in conversations. In living memory, the Fens have lost people, jobs, and services. The ties that kept communities together have weakened. Charities have seen demand grow. Infrastructure investments have been made for the benefit of the more affluent South, not theirs. And yet the Fens’ soil, skills, and food business hubs are without peer in the UK. The land, farmed back-to-back, has been providing at least a third of the country’s vegetables.
They have felt “used”, sometimes invisible, yet essential and strong. “We have always adapted and will continue to do so.”
Climate change was a major worry. But it was no springboard for future action. It was as if, once acknowledged, it was pushed back into the background, no longer a major player in the Fens’ future. At the centre instead: dashing entrepreneurs, healed communities, and a nation finally grateful for and protective of the place and people that feed it.
A story of living with climate change rather than wishing it away has not yet been told.
There is power in a story that accounts for losses and successes, recognises merit, and holds out the promise of bringing more of what makes life good, whether through repair or betterment. Such a story of the countryside and its people living with climate change rather than wishing it away has not yet been told. We all need to hear it. Otherwise, we will not be able to transform it into reality.
