Nature Conservation in the EU
What is the European Union aiming at when it claims to protect farmland biodiversity through agri-environmental schemes, and why is it not going well?
„Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern […] depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri-environment schemes (AES) […] are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We […] found that schemes implemented after revision of the EU’s agri-environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision.“ (Batáry et al. 2015: 1006).
Man-made Landscapes
The reason for implementing these schemes in the first place is the on-going crisis that is happening in Europe right now: the constant and rapid decline of its biodiversity. Plant and animal species that were adapted to the heterogeneous landscapes that the continent had offered for centuries are nowadays often on the brink of extinction. The crisis is manmade and rooted in the intensification of land use, with the extensive use of pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers, the elimination of field margins and hedgerows as well as the specialization in breeding being among the main drivers of biodiversity loss. In the central and eastern European countries, the collectivization of farms turned several small farms into homogenized agricultural production systems, whereas land abandonment and reforestation were responsible for the decline of farmland species in southern countries (ibid.).
In order to tackle these issues, the European Union – within the framework of the Common Agricultural Policy – has introduced voluntary measure in the 1990s, and agri-environmental schemes as such can be traced back even further to the 'Article 19 targeted scheme' of the structural regulation of 1985. The idea was to pay farmers a compensation for their loss of income that follows if they manage their land less intensively (O'Rouke 2020).
However, what has happened in the past three decades might be called the opposite of a success story:
„We find that in achieving their objectives these schemes have faced problems including limited environmental impact, low adoption by farmers, and conflicts between their environmental and income support objectives.“ (Hasler et al. 2022)
There are several reasons why the AES fail to meet the targets the EU has set: the lack of long-term stability, inadequate monitoring, poor targeting, and lack of payment differentiation, to mention only a few (ECA 2011, Batáry 2015). They are neither adapted to what species and habitats of conservation concern need nor do they encourage farmers to engage in them to such a degree that there is any positive long-term change.
And this is where results-based payment schemes come into play...