Land Use Programme
Information about the Land Use Dialogues engagement programme which explores the UK's most pressing land use challenges.
About
Land faces increasing demands from a wide range of economic and environmental objectives, including housing, transport, energy, food production, flood protection, water security and decarbonisation. To ensure the UK can meet challenging net zero and biodiversity targets while also delivering infrastructure and economic growth, measures to manage trade-offs and increase the sustainable productivity of land are required.
The Geospatial Commission’s National Land Data Programme made the case for how the UK can enhance land use data and spatial modelling to enable more joined-up decisions on land use. Through the Land Use Dialogues, regional pilots and in dialogue with land use stakeholders, the programme explored selected use cases and developed a blueprint of capability improvements to support land use decision-making.
This work culminated in the publication of Finding Common Ground in which we set out 4 recommendations that have become the cornerstone of the Geospatial Commission’s current Land Use Programme:
- To explore the creation of a Land Use Analysis Taskforce, which will bring together, through appropriate new cross-departmental governance, a shared spatial analysis capability to provide a spatially-explicit evidence base that will help inform the delivery of key national priorities
- To champion the market for decision support and visualisation tools to enable better land use decisions which create multifunctional benefits
- To strengthen the links between land use policy design, academic research and industry practice
- To develop a standard taxonomy for key land use data to support improvements to the interoperability of land use data and analysis
Geospatial AI
The Alan Turing Institute pilot
The Geospatial Commission partnered with The Alan Turing Institute on a pilot with Newcastle City Council to explore how complex local land use decision-making can be supported by scenario modelling using data science and AI techniques.
Emma Warneford, Senior Specialist in Planning at Newcastle City Council, and Prof. Dani Arribas-Bel, Deputy Programme Director in Urban Analytics at The Alan Turing Institute, tell us more about the first stage of this pilot.
Our work with places to date
Throughout Phase 1 of the programme, we worked with the Open Innovation Team on Land Use Dialogues. This saw the Geospatial Commission collaborate with regional partners to develop an understanding of how spatial data can inform local and regional land use strategy.
Devon and Cambridgeshire
In Devon and Cambridgeshire, we worked with the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and the British Geological Survey to support the design and development of a local land use framework. We invested in the design and prototyping of a spatial modelling decision support tool to help articulate the impacts of different land use change scenarios to local stakeholders. By improving how spatial data can be made accessible and visualised, local decision makers can more confidently appraise their land use choices.
Belfast
In Northern Ireland, we worked with Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland to produce an authoritative land cover and land use map of Derry City and Strabane District Council, which uses earth observation data to infill classification gaps. By improving our understanding of existing land use, we can make more informed decisions on how to better optimise land.
Find out more about the National Land Data programme pilots
Contact us
For media enquiries or if you would like to discuss any of our work further, please email us at: geospatial.commission@dsit.gov.uk