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Alistair McVitty

Reader in Environmental Economics at Scotland's Rural College (SRUC); environmental economist specializing in ecosystem services valuation and natural capital.

Jun 30, 2026

18:29
How did you go about kind of quantifying that? You know, putting a, a monetary value on the removing land from what was kind of previously production, um, and how does the report look into kind of trying to find what it would cost to put these kind of implementations in place?
18:48
Um, well, I think the key thing there is farmers will always understand what the value of the production from their land is, and they're gonna make decisions about which land could be taken out of production.
19:00
Um, so we're, we're, we're not talking about forcing land out of production.
19:03
But the way we looked at it in the report is that that productive capacity does have a, a wider social benefit.
19:09
So Lorna mentioned issues around food security and, and food supply.
19:14
So the values we were looking at there are, are the value of that lost productive capacity in terms of land as a, a natural capital asset.
19:22
And for that we were using land rental values as a sort of indication of how that land contributes to, to food production.
20:49
H- Does the report look into, you know, h- how would that, those benefits kind of be quantified and potentially in the future, you know, you could get paid for the benefit that you're providing to, that maybe right now doesn't have a kind of marketplace behind it to, to fund these kind of actions to take place?

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