The unavoidable agri-food system needs to provide affordable and healthy food for all. However, it is now widely accepted that food production comes with an unacceptable environmental and social costs. It accounts for 24% of all UK GHG emissions, led to significant biodiversity losses and driven challenging social issues not least from seasonal worker influxes to rural communities. In addition, farmers are under relentless cost pressure from dominant supply chain actors, eroding supply chain equity and local economies. These challenges are acute, not least across Greater Lincolnshire and north Cambridgeshire (LINCAM region), the UK's major production centre for crop-based agriculture and associated supply chain. Whilst there is no simple panacea for these challenges, agricultural technologies (AgTech) that concurrently drive economic and environmental / social productivity have a critical role. The LINCAM supply chain's significance and sheer scale has established a nationally renowned AgTech cluster, not least from the Universities of Lincoln and Cambridge. Both HEI's have specialised in interdisciplinary agri-food innovation, focussing on digital technologies including robotics and AI to drive productivity. Their work exploited a close working relationship with wider civic society and has been co-created across industry. For this established cluster, the LINCAM proposition enables the next step change. We will use AgTech to help address some of the most daunting challenges facing the LINCAM region and global agricultural productivity. We will deliver a step change by; 1. Broadening participation by provisioning LINCAM cluster access to all UK HEI's who wish to onward develop impacts from their AgTech innovations. Activities will include extensive cocreation with leading business and society partners plus direct training and funding for impact delivery. To embed impact delivery behaviours, all awards will be milestoned (go/no go) and accompanied by active pre, through and post award mentoring. 2. Extensive KE with leading businesses and civic society (GLLEP, CPCA, Lincolnshire County Council and West Lindsey District Council) to understand and mitigate barriers to adoption. Activities will include direct support with civic actors to develop local industrial strategies, lock down foreign direct investment, local planning, infrastructure and community development. The LINCAM project enables the cluster to consolidate and deliver nascent development objectives. This includes realisation of a nationally significant Agricultural Growth Zone north of Lincoln; our ambition is to transform the University's Riseholme Campus to a global innovation centre for AgTech. 3. Securing a legacy by embedding cocreation and human skills for AgTech innovation across the region and UK HEI's. We target the LINCAM region to become an AgTech gateway for the world, enabling the development of technologies in a place with industrial scale, export opportunities for AgTech companies and inward investment opportunities within both the AgTech and primary production sectors. Our key regional partners are civic society and an industry sector that supports 88,000 jobs, generates a GVA of £3.8bn and farms >50% of the UK's grade 1 land. However, despite this scale, the opportunity for Place based impact is significant. Social deprivation and attainment across the region are pressing concerns, many citizens are underserved. LINCAM offers an opportunity to secure sustainable growth, bringing high value and skilled jobs to the region, whilst mitigating the serious environmental impacts of the food production system.

Nature-based solutions (NbS*) are responses to societal challenges that involve working with nature to deliver benefits for both people and biodiversity. They include protecting existing ecosystems, restoring degraded ecosystems and managing working lands more sustainably. NbS are of national strategic importance in supporting the UK's net zero climate targets and the Government's ambition to improve the environment within a generation. They have gained international significance too: 131 countries include NbS in their UNFCCC climate change pledges. If well designed and robustly implemented, NbS will deliver multiple benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation, enhance biodiversity, promote human wellbeing and support economic recovery. The challenge is that the implementation of NbS is often piecemeal, narrow in focus, and undermined by weak research/policy/practice connections. UCam-Regen will redress this problem by applying its breadth of expertise in a practically driven analysis that provides the knowledge and tools needed to address several challenges facing the delivery of NbS: NbS can contribute significantly to achieving net zero emissions, although the extent of that contribution is limited by the finite amount of land available and critically by the effects of climate change on ecosystems. NbS are not an alternative to decarbonising the economy and must be accompanied by swift, deep emissions cuts; they must be designed with and for local communities; and they must deliver measurable benefits for biodiversity and be designed to be resilient to climate change i.e. a 'whole systems approach' must be applied - as in UCam-Regen - that integrates economies, societies, and nature. Scaling up, restoration and protection of key ecosystems across UK landscapes requires (a) better protection of natural habitats in the planning system; (b) reforming agriculture and forestry subsidies to better support actions that benefit both climate regulation and biodiversity; (c) connecting habitats across landscapes, building on the emerging Nature Recovery Networks; (d) making it compulsory to build an NbS framework into all new developments, and (e) making space on land for natural systems to adapt to climate change. There is a need to develop robust metrics to assess the effectiveness of a wide range of NbS for carbon sequestration, water regulation, biodiversity and human wellbeing. Well-designed new financing mechanisms, including tax incentives and public subsidies for ecosystem stewardship that meet the NbS guidelines and support climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and biodiversity, could be instrumental for upscaling NbS and improving social-ecological resilience to climate change, both in the UK and globally. UCam-Regen addresses these challenges by applying a whole systems approach to deliver knowledge and tools necessary to regenerate UK landscapes using NbS approaches. At the heart of the proposal is a recognition that local communities must be engaged with decisions regarding their landscape's future and co-produce solutions, informed by scientific assessments of the optimal landscape management approaches to maximise the delivery of ecosystem services. *We take policy recommendation and definitions from a COP26 Universities Network Briefing led by Prof Coomes https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_790171_smxx.pdf