When environmental policy needs a landscape, not just a farm
Photograph: C O’Flanagan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Water runs downhill, and it does not consult the land registry on the way. That plain fact causes a lot of trouble for agri-environment policy. The contract is with a farmer, but the river, the hedgerow network and the invasive species the contract is meant to deal with all cross farm boundaries. A bird or a pollinator has no reason to care where one parcel ends and the next begins.
Ireland’s Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme, ACRES, has started to deal with that mismatch directly. Payments still go to individual participants, as any payment scheme must, but its Co-operation approach allows some problems to be handled at a larger spatial scale. A second application window for Landscape Actions ran from 11 February to 28 May 2026, with examples including invasive species, scrub encroachment in species-rich grassland, threatened species and water-quality protection.
The experiment is not a small one. The Department describes ACRES as a €1.5 billion programme intended to support up to 50,000 farm families, and Budget 2026 reported almost 54,000 participating farmers with €280 million allocated for the year. A design change inside a scheme of that size reaches a great deal of Irish farmland.
Water quality is the clearest case for thinking beyond one holding. A farmer can change nutrient management on one farm, but the river receives the sum of what happens across the catchment. Habitat connectivity behaves in a similar way. One good patch may do little if its neighbours disappear, while several modest actions can add up once they connect. The outcome depends on a combination of decisions that are each made, and paid for, separately.
Economists will recognise the shape of this. Part of the benefit produced on one farm spills over to other farms and to the public, so the private incentive does not necessarily reflect the full social value created. Agri-environment payments already try to close some of that gap. Landscape coordination adds a harder problem, because the value of one farmer’s action may depend on whether neighbours act too.
Coordination carries its own costs. Someone has to define the landscape, choose the actions that suit it and judge outcomes that weather, soils and processes beyond any farmer’s control also shape. Results-based payments find this especially awkward, since the thing being rewarded is partly management and partly place. A larger planning unit can also become an excuse to assume one intervention fits everywhere inside it, and Irish farmland is too varied for that. The cost and environmental return of the same action change with soil, farm system and what happens next door.
Scheme design should start at the scale of the environmental process. Where outcomes depend on flows or connections across holdings, such as catchment water quality or habitat networks, the scheme should begin with the catchment or landscape and only then decide what individual farm contracts can deliver. Where the outcome sits within one field or holding, farm-level design is enough.
Elvis Kwame Ofori
Researcher and writer behind EKO Perspectives.
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