In a recent article, the Royal Society highlighted the increasing demands on land to feed and house a growing and increasingly wealthy population, mitigate climate change, restore biodiversity, and improve resilience in the face of global shocks. The article argues that successfully navigating these intersecting challenges will require science and innovation to increase the sustainable productivity of land for the multiple outputs society needs, including those that have market value (such as agricultural produce) and those with no or partial market value (such as biodiversity).

Now is a critical moment for land use policy globally, and especially in the UK, which needs to design replacements for EU agriculture, environment, and trade policies that it has been bound to for decades. The Royal Society recommends taking a multifunctional approach to land use decision-making that considers multiple market and non-market land-based outputs, increasing research and innovation to improve the sustainable productivity of all land-based outputs, developing new infrastructure to provide skills, training, and advice for land managers, developing a high-quality common evidence base to underpin land use decisions, and developing and coordinating spatially explicit national land use frameworks to ensure coherence across different areas of land use policy and between national and local scales.

At. Rethink Carbon, we build software to help with land management decisions, our software tool can help land managers implement the recommendations of the Royal Society by providing access to data, analytics, and insights that can inform multifunctional land use decision-making, improve the sustainable productivity of all land-based outputs, and enable the delivery of multiple outputs from the same piece of land. The Rethink Carbon platform supports the development of a high-quality common evidence base, facilitates the coordination of spatially explicit national land use frameworks, and enables the delivery of public and private green finance to where it is most needed.