Pathways, targets and temporalities: Analysing English agriculture's net zero futures

Abstract

Net zero emissions targets are of growing international relevance given their increasing uptake by governments across the world. This article analyses net zero targets as a distinctly future-oriented approach to environmental governance. It does so from a critical perspective, examining whether net zero targets serve to reproduce the existing temporalities of environmental policymaking or whether they represent a break with current practices and, in turn, develop new temporalities and novel ways of engaging with the future. In order to do this, this article focuses on efforts to reduce agricultural emissions in England to net zero. In 2019 the United Kingdom introduced legislation requiring a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. This, in turn, has encouraged actors in the food system to produce various imagined pathways to net-zero agriculture. This article critically analyses how these imagined pathways are discursively produced by influential actors within this sphere through a critical discourse analysis of recent grey literature produced by Defra, the Climate Change Committee and the National Farmers’ Union. It asserts that, to an extent, the net zero and target oriented approaches enshrined in current environmental policymaking represent the ongoing reproduction of both an ‘empty’ modernist future with some post-political dimensions. This assessment is, however, nuanced by recognising the tensions that emerge within and between the state and non-state institutions producing these discourses. Ultimately, however, the net zero transition draws actors together around a techno-optimistic vision of an agricultural future defined by sustainable intensification and negative emissions technologies. In doing so, it serves to suppress calls for transformative change in agriculture based on social as well as material change.

Between a Burden and Green Technology: Rishi Sunak’s Framing of Climate Change Discourse on Facebook and X (Twitter)

“…As previously mentioned in the article section that sets the scene of the present investigation, net zero appears to constitute a frequently occurring aspect of British political discourse. Consequently, Sunak's framing of climate change as Net Zero lends support to the literature (Booth, 2023;Gregory & Geels, 2024;Meckling & Allan, 2020;Paterson, 2021;Van Coppenolle et al, 2023), which demonstrates that the notion of net zero is incorporated into the current British political discourse on the issue of climate change. Another finding that follows from Table 2 is represented by the frame International Agreements, which reverberates with the literature (Johnston & Deeming, 2016;Porter et al, 2015;Webb & van der Horst, 2021;Youngs & Lazard, 2023), which posits that British political discourse on climate change is associated with legislative and statutory acts that aim at facilitating and adapting climate change-related laws and regulations.…”

“…As a means of climate change mitigation, the UK has introduced and, subsequently, implemented measures to reduce CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 (Johnston & Deeming, 2016). It should be noted that "net zero" is defined as the drastic reduction of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere (Booth, 2023).…”

“…Judging from the data, the frames testify to the economisation of climate change by Sunak, whose framing of the issue encapsulates, first of all, economic forces (Almiron et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2023). Interestingly, the frames Burden and Green Technology are more frequent than the frame Net Zero, despite the fact that the catchphrase "net zero" is widely used in the current political discourse in the UK (Booth, 2023;Paterson, 2021;Van Coppenolle et al, 2023;Webb & van der Horst, 2021).…”

An interactive model to assess pathways for agriculture and food sector contributions to country-level net-zero targets

“…Thus, they assume a concurrent increase of reforested lands and bioenergy production. However, assuming the large deployment of technology-optimistic solutions in the modelling exercise can increase the risk of adverse impacts as society moves towards net-zero paths 29 .…”

“…This still falls short in terms of nitrogen cycle, biodiversity and landscape restoration 3 . It also risks mal-adaptation and mal-mitigation suppressing the calls for a real transformative change 29 . As an illustration, the 6 th UK Carbon Budget 30 states that: "the ability of (…) agroecology farming measures to deliver deeper emissions reduction (…) and to deliver wider environmental benefits are not included in our scenarios due to the lack of robust evidence on the abatement potential", although some academic literature, for example, Poux et al demonstrates otherwise 3,28 .…”