Proposal to test and trial future Environmental Land Management Schemes on commons

Last Friday we submitted a proposal to Defra to test and trial:

1) test how future Environmental Land Management schemes will work on commons; i.e.that future schemes are commons proofed and to this end we support the principles set out in the Federation of Cumbria Commoners’ proposal though add in evaluation
and monitoring of the impacts on public benefit outcomes and farm businesses

2) test how multi-partite schemes on commons can be linked with individual commoners’ schemes on their own farm to both better integrate the common and the associatedfarms to secure the commoning system and deliver public benefits at landscape scale.

3) trial the delivery of an ELM scheme on at least two commons in both upland and lowland areas and within this trial integrate monitoring and evaluation as essential to measure success and inform adaptive management of these complex sites

You can read our proposal here.