Julie Urquhart

• BSc (Hons), MA (Dist), PhD, FRGS
• Senior Researcher at University of Gloucestershire

We describe experiences between 2018 and 2021 co-designing tree health policy options linked with the UK’s evolving land use policy post EU-Exit within the Future Farming and Countryside Programme. Policy makers, researchers and more than 250 land managers took part in a series of co-design engagements in a three-phase iterative co-design process t...

Forests are in the spotlight: they are expected to play a pivotal role in our response to society’s greatest challenges, such as the climate and biodiversity crises. Yet, the forests themselves, and the sector that manages them, face a range of interrelated threats and opportunities. Many of these are well understood, even if the solutions remain e...

According to stakeholders, many European farming systems are close to critical thresholds regarding the challenges they face (e.g., droughts, price declines), functions they deliver (e.g., economic viability, biodiversity and habitat) and attributes required for resilience (e.g., social self-organization). To accelerate a transition process towards...

Socio‐ecological research collaborations between artists, natural and social scientists, and with the humanities more broadly, have increased significantly in recent years. This has been aided by increased investment by funding bodies such as UK Research and Innovation and others internationally in projects designed to encourage cross‐disciplinary...

This report shares the findings of research workshops commissioned by the SPF Landscape Decisions Programme to better understand farmers’ and farm advisors’ motivations for adopting decision support tools (DSTs) in the UK and to provide recommendations for how uptake of DSTs can be enhanced.

Trees contribute greatly to urban environments and human well-being, yet relatively little is known about the extent to which a rising incidence of tree insect pests and pathogens may be affecting these contributions. To address this issue, we undertook a systematic review and synthesis of the diverse global empirical evidence on the impacts of urb...

Finding pathways to enhance the resilience of farming systems (FSs) in Europe is key, given the increasing challenges threatening them. FSs are complex socio-ecological systems in which social and ecological components are strongly linked. Social actors have the capacity to shape the FSs’ resilience, but there is a knowledge gap about how they can...

With global environmental challenges we are facing, such as the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, together with the role of ecosystems for human wellbeing, we can no longer rely on a singular disciplinary approach to address these challenges and the associated potential landscape change conflicts. In order to develop environmental strategies th...

Policy makers are challenged to find ways of influencing and supporting land manager behaviours and actions to deal with the impacts of increasing pressure from tree pests and diseases. This paper investigates attitudes and behaviours of farmers towards managing trees on farmland for pests and diseases. Data collection with farmers included deliber...

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...

Agriculture has a hugely important role to play in meeting many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ensuring the economic resilience of farms and improving their capacity to respond to a wide range of challenges is key if agriculture is to contribute positively to achieving SDGs and sustainable growth. This paper aims to calculate the...

Accumulating shocks and long-term stresses, such as trade conflicts, climate change and deteriorating public trust in agricultural practices have raised concerns about the resilience of Europe’s diverse farming systems. The SURE-Farm approach aims to systematically assess the resilience capacities of farming systems, i.e. regional constellations of...

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...

This chapter aims to synthesize key findings from the SURE-Farm project. We first discuss possible amendments to the framework to assess the resilience of farming systems. We then review why many of Europe’s farming systems face a formidable and structural resilience crisis. While emphasizing the diversity of resilience capacities, challenges and n...

Enhancing farm resilience has become a key policy objective of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to help farmers deal with numerous interrelated economic, environmental, social, and institutional shocks and stresses. A central theme in resilience thinking is the role of the unknown, implying that knowledge is incomplete and that change, unc...

Forests worldwide are facing increasing pressures, with human travel and trade assisting the spread of pests and diseases. Climate change is likely to enhance the negative impacts of pests and diseases, which cause global declines and local extinctions. In this research we focus on three local and regional knowledge networks in the UK concerned wit...

Understanding the complex process of generational renewal (GR) in agriculture is essential for supporting the continuation of farming. This paper demonstrates how multiple factors, simultaneously and through their mutual interactions, influence GR and related individual decision-making processes. Results originated from 155 in-depth interviews perf...

This session will explore the new interdisciplinary research agenda that will be needed to underpin and help deliver forest expansion and improved tree health, management and protection as key international climate policy objectives. Jointly chaired by the UK’s Future Treescapes Ambassadors, the session will bring together future leaders in treesca...

Greater resilience is needed for farms to deal with shocks and disturbances originating from economic, environmental, social and institutional challenges, with resilience achieved by adequate adaptive governance. This study focuses on the resilience capacity of farms in the context of multi-level adaptive governance. We define adaptive governance a...

Context Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses, including the unknown and previously unimaginable, such as the Covid-19 crisis. Objective This paper assesses (i) how different farming systems were exposed to the crisis, (ii) which resilience capacities were revealed and (iii) how resilience was enabled or constrained by the far...

A number of recent scientific publications have called for significant reductions in meat consumption in order to mitigate the negative impacts of the food system on the planet. Public debate around this issue is not straightforward, however, with plant-based and alternative-protein narratives contested by an agro-ecological narrative. These compet...

The resilience of EU farming systems is perceived to be low to moderate. Many farming systems are perceived to be close to critical thresholds, with low economic viability leading to farmer exits, making it hard to maintain the social fabric, natural resources and biodiversity. There are limits to success with regard to increasing farm size and int...

This chapter reflects on a set of methodological considerations that can arise when undertaking fisheries social science research, specifically when engaging face-to-face with fishers and the wider fishing community. Challenges include, the (often) geographical remoteness of fisheries fieldwork, the dangers of a busy harbourside, the male-dominated...

An increasing variety of stresses and shocks provides challenges and opportunities for EU farming systems. This article presents findings of a participatory assessment on the sustainability and resilience of eleven EU farming systems, to inform the design of adequate and relevant strategies and policies. According to stakeholders that participated...

en Sufficient generational renewal is an important contributor to resilient farming systems but across the EU there is widespread concern over the so‐called ‘young farmer problem’. This article recommends several policy areas to support generational renewal. The first need is to clearly define the exact generational renewal challenge, since availab...

Paper aim was to identify the factors who enable or hinder adaptive capacity and the strategies that promote learning at the level of small-mixed farms from Nord-Est region in Romania. A qualitative approach was used to better understand the complexity of individual decision-making and the lived experience of farmers as they adapt to the challenges...

The sustainability and resilience of EU farming systems are threatened. According to stakeholders in selected EU farming systems, many of these systems are close to critical thresholds regarding the challenges they face (e.g., droughts, price declines), functions they deliver (e.g., economic viability, biodiversity and habitat) and attributes requi...

Tree and forest health is increasingly influenced by climate change as well as growing globalisation and trade. Climate change enables species to colonise new environments, and species that previously were constrained by native predators are now able to flourish in these new environments with little or no resistance. Additionally, the growing trade...

In facing future challenges, risk management ( RM ) is essential for European farming systems ( FS ). This article synthesises lessons learned on RM based on a farm survey, interviews with farmers, and focus groups involving a range of FS actors. In contrast to previous literature, we broaden the definition of RM to include strategies that target l...

With the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union and increasing pressures from climate change, English arable farming resilience is in a fragile position. Most Brexit impact assessments have focused on quantitative analysis, however here we take a qualitative approach to assess how future trade agreements could impact the resilience of the UK...

This paper draws on network science and uses a Social Network Analysis to improve our understanding of how the implementation of no-till in England is influenced by farmers' social networks. No-till is a low disturbance farming practice with potential to benefit soil health, the aquatic environment and farm economy, but is currently only implemente...

For improving sustainability and resilience of EU farming system, the current state needs to be assessed, before being able to move on to future scenarios. Assessing sustainability and resilience of farming systems is a multi-faceted research challenge in terms of the scientific domains and scales of integration (farm, household, farming system lev...

Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms, farmers' organizations, service suppliers and supply chain ac...

This paper seeks to address the need for a more nuanced understanding of public perceptions of risk-related events by investigating the nature of and drivers for a ‘concerned public’ to an environmental issue, using the case study of the ash dieback outbreak in the UK. Q Methodology, an approach that combines both quantitative and qualitative data...

This report presents the results of a participatory sustainability and resilience assessment of 11 farming systems in the European Union (EU). The assessment focussed on system functions, applied strategies and resilience attributes. Overall, workshop results revealed a high allocated importance to the functions related to food production and econo...

It is widely acknowledged within the risk literature that the mass media play a pivotal role in shaping information about risk events for audiences. While some risk events reflect occurrences specific to particular times and locations, other risk events are more difficult to temporally and spatially situate as they are dispersed across years or mon...

‘Public concern’, a ubiquitous notion used in descriptive and explanatory modes by policy makers, academics and the media, is often presented as axiomatic. However, the variability with which it is deployed in different contexts, for example, as justification for policy attention or having equivalence with what is considered ‘newsworthy’, belies th...

Public concern is a pivotal notion in the risk perception, communication and management literature. It is, for example, a central concept with regard to the social amplification of risk, and as a justification for policy attention. Despite its ubiquity, the notion of public concern remains a ‘black box’ presenting a poorly understood state of affai...

Learning is an important component for resilience building in farm systems, not least because resilience involves responding to a whole range of social, environmental, economic and political disturbances and changes. Farmers, therefore, need the ability to cope and adapt to these disturbances, or make radical realignments in response to major shock...

This chapter lays the foundations for future social science research in tree health. A broad range of pests, pathways and stakeholders are considered by the authors, who explore the significance of collaborative approaches to management to ensure inclusion of diverse values, experiences, impacts and agency. The chapter highlights the complexities i...

The risks posed by tree pests and diseases have been widely recognised in expert circles, but the degree to which this awareness is shared by publics and stakeholders is still unclear. There is a potential conflict between government attempts to manage the risks, media coverage and the ways in which publics and stakeholders make sense of the threat...

Trees, forests and woodlands provide a wide range of ecosystem services that contribute to human health and well-being. However, these benefits are increasingly under threat from the growing incidence of tree pest and disease outbreaks worldwide, with diverse economic, social and environmental impacts in both rural and urban settings. The increase...

This book explores the specifically human dimensions of the problem posed by a new generation of invasive pests and pathogens to tree health worldwide. The growth in global trade and transportation in recent decades, along with climate change, is allowing invasive pests and pathogens to establish in new environments, with profound consequences for...

Farming systems in Europe face a vast range of environmental, economic, social and institutional challenges. Examples include more volatile producer and input prices, higher probability of extreme weather events, increasing dependence on land owners and financial institutions, organizational change within value chains, competing policy objectives a...

The contributors to this volume engaged in different ways with social wellbeing as an approach through which to investigate, identify and make visible a broad range of values associated with small-scale fisheries. In this concluding chapter, we highlight four themes that emerge from these contributions that are crucial for thinking about the divers...

Reductive practices in fisheries management have tended to focus on ecological and economic dimensions that have rendered the social and cultural importance of fishing largely invisible, at least in the context of governance and policy making. This chapter builds on 5 years’ research in the English Channel and Southern North Sea in which the author...

Increased global biosecurity threats to trees, woods and forests have been strongly linked to the upsurge in worldwide trade and the expansion of tourism. A whole range of social, economic and political actors are implicated and affected by the movement of pests and diseases along these international pathways. A number of factors affect the actions...

The Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) is often used as a conceptual tool for studying diverse risk perceptions associated with environmental hazards. While widely applied, it has been criticised for implying that it is possible to define a benchmark 'real' risk that is determined by experts and around which public risk perceptions can s...

The growing incidence of invasive tree pest and disease outbreaks is recognised as an increasing threat to ecosystem services and human wellbeing. Linked to global trade, human movement and climate change, a number of outbreaks have attracted high public and media attention. However, there is surprisingly little evidence characterising the nature o...

It has long been recognised that the traditional media play a key role in representing risk and are a significant source of information which can shape how people perceive and respond to hazard events. Early work utilising the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) sought to understand the discrepancy between expert and lay perceptions of ri...

Stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognised as an essential component of environmental management. But what does it mean to have a ‘stake’ in tree health? In this chapter we use case-study analysis to explore the stakeholder concept in relation to tree health. We develop a framework to underpin better understanding of the stakeholder landscap...

The growing incidence of new tree pest and disease epidemics, many of them with the potential to radically reshape our native woodlands and forests, is closely linked to a significant upsurge in global trade and transportation in recent decades. At the same time, interventions designed to actually manage any pest and disease outbreaks that occur ca...

The 21st Century Catch Toolkit is a product of the INTERREG IVa 2 Seas project GIFS (Geography of Inshore Fishing and Sustainability). Work on the GIFS project was completed between January 2012 and September 2014 and was undertaken by a collaboration of six partners from four European countries bordering the Southern North Sea and English Channel...

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries fisheries policies and management systems worldwide changed as commercial fish stocks declined and fishing pressure intensified. Increased technological developments have enabled fishing fleets to become highly mobile and efficient and, together with a growing demand for fish for human consu...

There is increasing interest in the social and cultural impacts of marine fisheries in coastal communities. This chapter uses the idea of ‘sense of place’ to explore the material and perceptual relations that emerge as a result of marine fishing in a range of villages and towns in France and England along the English Channel. Currently sense of pla...

At the outset this book presented the idea that sustainable management of fisheries is a complex and difficult area to negotiate. Through the example of the evolution of the Common Fisheries Policy in Europe in Chap. 1, it was argued that politics, power and governance play key roles in influencing management debates and discourses and it demonstra...

Fishing communities in Europe are facing significant challenges due to policy measures aimed at reducing fishing effort in order to cope with the ‘crisis’ in key stocks. While it is imperative to ensure sustainability of the resource, such policies may overlook the contribution of fisheries to the social and cultural wellbeing of coastal communitie...

Fishing communities in Europe are facing significant challenges due to policy measures aimed at reducing fishing effort in order to cope with the “crisis” in key stocks. While it is imperative to ensure sustainability of the resource, such policies may overlook the contribution of fisheries to the social and cultural well-being of coastal communiti...

il s'agit d'un type de produit dont les métadonnées ne correspondent pas aux métadonnées attendues dans les autres types de produit : REPORT

This volume is an interdisciplinary mix of perspectives and studies on social issues in fisheries from a diverse range of case studies and research disciplines. The case is made regarding the dearth of attention to socio-cultural considerations which to date have been largely treated as an externality of fisheries policy. It will be valuable to res...

Inshore fishing communities in England, as elsewhere, are facing challenges as they struggle to deal with policy measures aimed at reducing fishing effort. Drawing on findings from a study aimed at exploring the role of fishing for place-making and identity creation in Cornwall, we argue that there may be potential opportunities for developing insh...

Many coastal communities have strong links to fishing that span generations where fishing is a way of life that goes beyond the means to earning a living. Fishing's influence is not confined to those activities that take place at sea, but spills over onto land to create a particular identity and sense of place in coastal towns inherently linked to...

The livelihoods and way of life of fishing communities globally are increasingly threatened as they struggle to cope with dwindling fish stocks and an increasing regulatory regime. However, the social and cultural aspects of marine fisheries are often overlooked in fisheries policy and management frameworks that focus on the biological and economic...

Increasing emphasis is being placed in forest policies to deliver public goods such as biodiversity, recreation, landscape and carbon sequestration, alongside timber production. In light of this, it is important to understand how woodland owners themselves perceive their role in delivering these multiple benefits. With up to 80% of woodland in some...

The diversity of woodland ownership in England has increased in recent decades to encompass a wide range of non-financially-oriented owners, many with little previous experience of woodland management. With public benefits such as environmental conservation, amenity and carbon sequestration being increasingly emphasised in forest policy agendas, th...

The fishing industry is undergoing major restructuring driven by fisheries management and policy responses to ecological problems in key stocks. Many commentators and policy makers refer to a “crisis” in fisheries, with a number of commercial species in serious decline and the livelihoods of fishers, especially those in smaller fishing communities,...

There is increasing emphasis on multipurpose forestry within UK national and regional forest strategies, with the aim of co-delivering the social, environmental and economic benefits of woodlands. Private woodland ownership is also changing, with an increase in owners without a farming or forestry background. However, there is little substantive ev...

This paper examines the trade-offs between woodland management for timber and public good outputs in English woodlands. Recent evidence suggests that some public good values may be declining as a result of a lack of woodland management. Such under-management has been attributed to the decline in timber values and reduction in the productivity of wo...

"The role and nature of woodland and forest ownership is changing significantly in England. Environmental conservation and enhancement, the provision of recreation and amenity and the use of biofuels to mitigate climate change are being increasingly emphasized in new policy agendas. In light of the growing emphasis on multi-functional forestry, it...