What are you asking for?

We are asking the Church Commissioners, the wealthy investment arm of the Church of England, to commit to rewild 30% of their land by 2030 – the target set by the UN.

In the age of the climate and nature crisis, land is our single most important environmental resource. Land that is degraded, stripped of habitat or farmed intensively drives the decline of nature and the heating of our climate. Land that is rewilded does the opposite, helping our precious ecosystems recover whilst locking up huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.  At the moment, Church land is even more degraded than the UK’s already poor average, but as a large landholder, rewilding some of their land could make a huge difference.

By rewilding 30% of their land, the Church Commissioners have the power to restore an area of land half the size of Dartmoor. It is for this reason that the Church Commissioners’ land, and what they decide to do with it matters to all of us in Britain; people of any faith or none, and the rest of the living world.

Why the Church?

This is not about the Church as a religious institution. We at Wild Card believe in the freedom to practise any religion, and respect the work that the Church does in many areas. We are specifically looking at the Church Commissioners, who are major landowners.. As major landowners, they have a responsibility to take care of the land for us and future generations.

Who are the Church Commissioners?

The Church Commissioners are  one of England’s top 10 institutional landowners, owning 105,000 acres – that’s one and half times the size of Dartmoor National Park!  At the end of 2023, their investment fund held assets worth over £10bn, and they contribute around 20% of the running costs of the Church of England.

Whilst some small and promising efforts for nature are underway in the Church, analysis of Church Commissioners’ land reveals that it is  significantly nature depleted. There is three times less tree coverage on their land than the UK’s already dismal average, and over half of the Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on their land are in an unfavourable condition. Given that Britain ranks in the bottom 10% of all nations globally for biodiversity, this suggests the Church is presiding over some of the most nature depleted land on the planet. 

The Church Commissioners own and profit from a vast area of farmland. This farmland is dotted throughout the entire length of England with landholdings from Devon to County Durham and many counties in between, although exactly where all the land is located is unclear as the Commissioners have hitherto refused to release a map of their land. 

Are any Christians involved with this campaign?

Yes! This has been led within Wild Card by a Christian, and we have been working closely with Christian Climate Action, other Christian faith-based groups, clergy, and Synod members to ensure we are representing views from across the Christian community and Church institution. 

What about God’s Green Acre and other green church initiatives?

There are a lot of amazing projects out there, centred around churches, churchyards, congregations and their religious leaders. We fully support the work that these communities are doing to allow nature to flourish in their neighbourhoods. However, we are looking at the Church Commissioners as major landowners that own land that is not centred around churches, and that have the ability to make huge gains for nature across the country.

Aren’t the Church Commissioners already doing a lot for nature?

The Church Commissioners are exempt from Freedom of Information requests and do not publish maps of their land, nor any data on its condition or use type. However, thanks to investigations by author and campaigner Guy Shrubsole, we now have a view of the state of a lot of it. Working with Tim Harris, Shrubsole revealed that just 3% of the Church Commissioners’ land in England is woodland, putting it at the bottom of the league table of England’s ten biggest landowners for tree coverage. 

Wetlands, peatlands, grasslands, scrublands and other habitats are all also vital habitats for our struggling wildlife. To look for these, we can look at the percentage of the land which is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) – the most important ecological designation in the UK. According to Shrubsole and Harris’s research, the Church Commissioners land scores very badly with just 2% of its land designated as a SSSI – and over half of that land that is in unfavourable condition. In short, from the data we have available, Church Commissioner land would appear to be just as nature depleted as most of the farmland in Britain. 

Didn’t the Synod already pass a Land and Nature motion?

In February 2024, the Church’s General Synod passed a motion calling for action to boost biodiversity across the various landholdings of the Church. This motion, which you can read in full here, is a fantastic step in the right direction. However, it is fundamentally undermined by a lack of concrete and measurable targets against which success or failure can be measured, and by its failure to instruct ambitious action from the Church Commissioners.. 

The motion’s only section on the Church Commissioners states that the Synod: 

f. Request the Church Commissioners to report back to General Synod within three years about their progress with:

i. enhancing and supporting biodiversity across their agricultural and forestry land,

ii. engagement and collaboration with tenants about sustainable farming, and

iii. their leadership amongst landowners in a way that recognises the importance of shared learning, support and respect in achieving these objectives.’

This unfortunately does not hold the Commissioners to account on anything concrete. The UN’s target has an area based percentage, so by failing to set a percentage target of the Commissioners land to be moved back to nature, the Synod motion is highly unlikely to result in the action we urgently need to see.

The Church Commissioners own a lot of prime farmland, and we need to feed the nation. Won’t this hurt our ability to feed ourselves?

The Church Commissioners have claimed that their land is “all high grade farmland” and as such, for the sake of food security, should be exempted from any substantial rewilding efforts. This is untrue. 

However, most important to recognise is that the collapse of nature and the overheating of our climate is already destroying crops and decimating harvests. Restoring nature, and with it our climate, is now the only viable route to a food secure future. Farming every inch of land available is the short termist equivalent of cutting off the branch we’re sitting on. 

Thankfully there is more than enough space for this. 85% of UK farmland is used for grazing or feeding livestock. Even a moderate reduction in meat consumption, something called for by all major climate institutes, would free up more than enough land to meet the 30×30 target. 

The same is likely true of Church Commissioner land and we encourage them to release data about how much of their land is livestock farming, horticulture and arable. 

It is also worth noting that  grade 1 and 2 farmland is highly productive (and so it makes sense to continue farming them) but grades 4 and 5 are very unproductive, generally situated in our uplands and can often be so unproductive and reliant on imported fertiliser and feed as to be net negative in their calorie production. From a purely food security point of view, rewilding Grade 4 and 5 is a no brainer. Sitting in the middle is Grade 3 land which is borderline but generally considered suitable for rewilding, with projects backed by taxpayer money through the government schemes such as Boothby Wildland being situated on Grade 3 land. Similarly, large solar farms have recently been approved by the government to be situated on Grade 3 land. 

The Commissioners disclosed in 2020 that 39% of their rural holdings was Grades 1 and 2, whilst 56% was Grade 3. According to Guy Shrubsole and Tim Harris, around 5% is Grade 4 3% is forest, and 2% are SSSIs. and then there’s some land in other uses like housing. 5,000 acres (just under 5% of their holdings) in Cambridgeshire is lowland peat, which is grade 1. Whilst this land is technically very fertile it is essentially a massive carbon bomb releasing significant quantities of the greenhouse gas each year. This should be urgently rewetted so that it can start storing carbon again, but could still be farmed using paludiculture (“swamp farming”) whilst having huge benefits for nature. 

So, woodland (3%) + SSSIs (2%) + Grade 4 farmland (5%) + the lowland peat in Cambridgeshire (5%) + just a quarter of the borderline but definitely rewildable Grade 3 holdings (15%) and hey presto, the Church Commissioners are now world leaders on nature restoration, all without touching any prime farmland at all! In short, 30% is very doable. 

Why rewilding instead of regenerative agriculture?

It is sometimes claimed that we don’t need rewilding because more regenerative forms of farming can make up for the catastrophic decline of nature we are witnessing. This is a false dichotomy. We should be working towards a world in which all farming is as regenerative as possible, but that doesn’t take away the vital need for large areas to be entirely given over to natural processes. The Kunming-Montreal protocol, based on the work of thousands of the world’s leading scientists, recognises this fact when it defines the 30% of land protected for nature as land that is free from any kind of extractive industry. This isn’t a target you can cheat by trying to sneak farming into the protected areas. 

We understand that the Church Commissioners have engaged with some of their tenant farmers to encourage regenerative farming techniques. This is great and should be extended. But it’s simply not enough. If nature is to survive it needs large dedicated areas where nature is the primary output – not food or any other extractive practice.

Won’t this hurt farmers?

Ultimately, a functioning ecosystem and climate will help farmers. More business as usual, and farming will continue to get harder and more uncertain year on year.

Almost all of the farmland owned by the Commissioners is rented out to tenant farmers, often on long leases of 10 years and upward. This makes a rapid transition to rewilding that land difficult, but not impossible. Tenancies come up for renewal on a regular basis somewhere in the country, making it possible to renegotiate contracts to include rewilding now. Engagement with tenants in the middle of their contracts also makes immediate change possible. 

Wild Card proposes that wherever possible, tenant farmers should be supported to continue as land managers either of part or fully rewilded farms. With significant new income streams for rewilding in our new post-Brexit subsidy scheme alongside lucrative natural capital business opportunities on the private market, rewilding is a financially viable option – as long as the landlord agrees.

We argue that the Commissioners should in fact go further and reinvest some of their significant profits as grants directly to their tenant farmers to support rewilding – an initiative that could be started immediately. It surely cannot be the case that retired clergy want their pensions to be funded from intensively farming every last inch of the countryside until there is no nature left when other viable options exist. 

A final possibility is to do what the National Trust and others are doing and, when a tenancy agreement comes to its contractual end, take the land back “in hand” and manage it directly as a nature restoration project. 

Doesn’t charity law prevent rewilding? 

No. Not only are numerous rewilding projects now just as or more financially profitable than intensive farming, charities also have a duty to protect the long term value of their assets. Climate heating and biodiversity collapse are undermining the value of the Church’s land assets. Extreme weather is harming yields on their tenanted land. 

It is entirely coherent with charity law to protect and restore the overall health of its land portfolio by deploying nature restoration as part of its risk management and climate/nature crisis mitigation strategy. We are happy to link them up with lawyers who can help them on this.

So, how are you trying to drive this change?

Our petition to the Archbishop and the Church Commissioners to commit to rewild 30% of their 105,000 acres by 2030 is now over 100,000 signatures. In October, we marched from the Tate Modern to St Paul’s Cathedral with Chris Packham and hundreds of clergy and laity (see these write-ups in the Independent and in the Church Times). We delivered our ‘95 Wild Theses’, written by people such as Dr Rowan Williams, Stephen Fry, George Eustice, Caroline Lucas, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Michael Gove, which you can read in full here.

In collaboration with many members of the Church and Christian community, we are now working to support the drafting and passing of a Private Member’s Motion which sets out measurable and time-bound targets for rewilding of Church Commissioners’ land. We hope this will build on the Land and Nature motion. Rewilding 30% by 2030 will demonstrate to Christians and the wider public that the Church understands the emergency facing us, and is keen to be on the right side of history.

How can I help?

If you’re a member of the Church or Synod, and would like to be involved in drafting the motion, or supporting us in any other way, please do get in touch at info@wildcard.land

If you are not a church member but would like to support the campaign, please sign the petition!