 Land is a precious and increasingly limited resource. We use it to build houses and grow our food, to connect with nature and experience the outdoors, to tackle climate change and loss of biodiversity. But the demands we put on land are going up year on year, so if we don't change how we use our land soon, we might just run out. Judy Ling Wong is the honorary president of the Black Environment Network. She's agreed to meet me here at Kew Gardens in London to tell me more about Britain's land challenge. So Judy, what are the challenges we're facing with our land? You know as me, land is about life itself. Eighty percent of the population lives in urban areas, but everything's linked to land and land is now so limited. The pressure of population, climate change and the challenges of biodiversity. We must think about how we efficiently use land in order to move into a sustainable future. So how can we use land more efficiently and sustainably? In order to inform our action, science plays a great role. Some places are much more suitable for a particular aspect of land use. Others can accommodate a mixture of them. The choices have to be informed by sound science. Agroforestry is a great example where we actually introduce trees in a landscape that would otherwise be covered just in crops or just for growing animals. By introducing trees gives us better water quality, biodiversity and carbon storage. I think we must think about science as spanning both social and natural sciences. It is about getting all stakeholders on board, informing them of a whole range of scientific analysis so that they can really make good choices. It's clear that science is crucial in helping us to solve our land use issues. So I'm off to the Otter Valley in Devon to speak with Dr Sam Bridgewater about how they're already using science and working with nature to transform the landscape. What informs your decisions about how to use land for the future? Everybody wants something different from the landscape. So if you're trying to deliver a lot of landscape scale change you need to involve lots of different parties. A good example of that for us would be the Lower Otter Restoration Project. It's trying to adapt the Lower Otter Valley to climate change and restore about 55 hectares of salt marsh and mudflat which was the natural original habitat for the valley. These kind of habitats are important for many species of fish, wading birds, storing carbon. There are multiple things that landscape can be delivering depending on how you manage it. The flood embankment was built several hundred years ago that essentially drained salt marsh and mudflat for agriculture. Now with sea level rise that flood embankment is starting to fail and it's better to manage the process preemptively. The sea is coming back up that valley whether we like it or not and there's all sorts of things that shouldn't really be there. We have already relocated the cricket club to a new site. We are protecting an old municipal tip which is environmental liability and the fields that are there now, the kind of pastoral landscape will change to salt marsh and mudflat over a five-year period. One of the things that took quite a lot of time was having that discussion with the existing farmers and they negotiate the release of land elsewhere so they can still have their business. It can be challenging to reconcile these different demands and of course it's very place-specific. Food production where we are now is not incompatible with having a nature-rich landscape. We have some fairly new beaver habitats here and the dams are now increased. That beaver wetland happens to be upstream of a village that is historically flooded on a regular basis and water comes down through that wetland it's storing like a sponge and the peak flows are reduced. The benefits of those beavers there far outweigh the loss of agriculture which is pretty small. When things like this happen it's a kind of opportunity. Should we as society be more interested in land? Absolutely because land affects all of us and I think it's absolutely critical. I feel I've gained a new appreciation for land and why we need science to use it well. If you'd like to have a go at creating your own landscape that works for both people and nature check out our multifunctional landscapes interactive. Go to rawsociety.org.