Cranfield part of consortium awarded more than £2.5 million for Net Zero research

Cranfield University is part of a consortium, led by the University of Gloucestershire, that has received over £2.5 million in joint funding from UK Research and Innovation, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

The project - called the LUNZ Footprint - is part of the larger Land Use for Net Zero, Nature and People (LUNZ) programme that is supporting research with Government, research organisations and industry to achieve the Government's target of net zero by 2050.

The LUNZ Footprint will develop a ''To Zero Fifty' Greenhouse Gas Accounting Living Lab' which aims to develop and evaluate a scalable, auditable, farm- and food-level greenhouse gas accounting framework for UK land use to sustainably reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The project brings together industry and academia, led by the University of Gloucestershire and including Cranfield University, the University of Aberdeen, Harper Adams University and Scotland's Rural College joining with commercial entities Savills, Farm Carbon Toolkit, Agrecalc and the Cool Farm Alliance.

This project is important because the tools currently used by farms to identify and understand their greenhouse gas emissions can provide different outputs. Finding a way for the farming and food sector to accurately and reliably measure and interpret greenhouse gas production and emissions is an important step in the journey to net zero. The project will also consider the costs, benefits and trade-offs of different ways of verifying farm-level accounts, and the social, economic, food production, and environmental impacts of scaling greenhouse gas accounting in the UK.

Professor Paul Burgess, who is leading the Cranfield team, commented: "If the UK is going to achieve net zero it will require a multi-faceted approach, but one of the key elements is accurately tracking greenhouse gas emissions.

"Measuring emissions is a vital starting point from which you can quantify whether actions you're taking are making a difference. This framework will help the farming and food sector understand where they're starting from and how management changes can help to reduce net emissions."

Cranfield is also involved in another of the LUNZ projects, called 'LUNZ Justlanz', involving Professor Jack Hannam, Professor of Pedology at Cranfield Environment Centre.