Future of our countryside

Earlier this month David Miliband, Secretary of State for Defra, gave a speech to the CPRE on the future of the countryside. He raised a number of important questions that ecologists need to engage with.

• Improving our understanding of ecosystem services in order to value environmental assessets that have been seen as free goods
• Reforming CAP to improve the provision of environmental goods
• Re-wilding less productive agricultural land
• Understanding how climate change will affect conservation designations
• Valuing the role that forests, peat bogs and other ecosystems play in carbon sequestration

There is on-line debate at both his and the CPRE’s blog.