FARMERS should be paid or given green tax breaks to encourage them to turn their fields into woodlands in the fight against climate change, a leading environmental body has said.

Natural England wants to double the amount of "wild" land in the region from the current nine per cent to around 20 per cent over the next few years to help slow global warming and prevent flooding caused by heavier rainfall.

The Government agency says to do this it may need to either buy land or pay farmers a subsidy to ensure they maintain it in the long term.

The move was welcomed by environmental groups and the NFU, though the farmers' group was concerned at issues raised over food security.

Simon Bates, Natural England's senior project manager for climate change, told the Western Morning News that the pace of global temperature rises meant that intensive action was needed and quickly.

"We would need to buy a substantial amount (of land)," he said.

"I can't say how much but we couldn't do it alone simply by working with existing landowners. The time scales wouldn't fit."

The creation of woodland and other wild habitats is seen as having three motives. The trees act as "carbon traps", which help to reduce the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide. They also, when planted on flood plains, help to lessen the risk of serious floods by acting as a natural barrier and sponge. Third, they act as areas where threatened wildlife or newly arrived species can flourish.

But to do this most effectively they need to be mature woodlands, which take years to grow. Current programmes like the Environmental Stewardship Scheme pay farmers to keep areas in a fallow state but they are under contracts of 10 years, after which farmers can plough the land and start using it for crops again.

Natural England wants to introduce covenants lasting much longer to give areas a better chance to flourish.

"The important thing is to ensure that there is some sort of covenant," Mr Bates added. "It is all very well starting to lock up carbon in a tree, but if you then fell it you release the carbon again. We are trying to influence the carbon markets and emerging policies so we might be able to, or society might be able to, offer that longer-term payment."

He admitted the idea of buying land for this purpose was tricky in the current economic climate, saying the scheme would have to get "creative" and suggested "green tax breaks".

"Why not, if it is ultimately benefiting society by bolstering some of these things that we take for granted? If we destroy the uplands or lose the peat bogs we are going to have a poor water supply and the cost of water will go up." But he stressed the need to work alongside farmers and working farms, not just grubbing them up.

"A lot of our wildlife thrives in farmland and most of our habitats down here are managed in some way by farmers. We are not saying this needs to be wall-to-wall prime wild habitat."

The National Farmers' Union was cautious about the idea, saying that its members already do a lot of this voluntarily.

It said that the need for food security and less reliance on imports were equally as important in the face of global warming and decreasing areas of farmland around the world. It said Natural England seemed to be "obsessed with carbon sinks, bogs and swamps" but not with the ability of farmers to work effectively.

"The UK is now 60 per cent self- sufficient, that is down 10 per cent in the last 10 years," a spokesman said.

"In a world with six million more mouths to feed every month and the worsening climate we have, both economic and atmospheric, it is foolhardy for a country to contemplate decreasing its domestic larder."

However, he added that farmers were already working with various groups to make their farms more wildlife-friendly.

Friends of the Earth welcomed the idea. Its campaign coordinator for the South West, Mike Birkin, said: "For the sake of wildlife and our own resilience to climate change these big-scale things are what we need to do. If nature is confined to a series of small areas it will not be as able to adapt to a changing climate."

The RSPB has also spoken of the need to expand wildlife reserves to allow for the changes global warming will have on where flora and fauna species live.