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European Forum on Nature Conservation and Pastoralism

EFNCP

We work to: • Reverse the decline of the low-intensity farming types with the highest natural capital across Europe, summarised in the term High Nature Value (HNV) farming. • Make these farming types socially, economically and environmentally sustainable at the farm and landscape scales in order to conserve European biodiversity and wider ecosystem services. • Improve understanding, through studies and local projects, of the policy, socio-economic and cultural interactions that are key factors in the creation of a sustainable future for HNV farming. • Develop, test and promote innovative policy solutions through case-studies and dialogue with local and EU partners. • Enable networking and dialogue, especially between actors from the environmental and farming worlds who traditionally have not found common ground. • Engage with EU policy processes, especially on the Biodiversity Strategy and CAP, and improve implementation and integration of these at national and regional (...)

Lobbying Activity

Response to Protecting biodiversity: nature restoration targets

19 Aug 2022

We welcome this bold and ambitious initiative. However, coming from the perspective of High Nature Value farming systems as we do, we find the proposal to have a very significant blind spot. As written, it largely ignores or undervalues the key role of agricultural management, particularly as part of low-intensity farming systems, in the maintenance of a large number of Annex 1 habitats (the so-called Halada habitats) and priority species, and indeed for wider biodiversity (European endemic vascular plants, to take just one example). Agriculture does indeed ‘depend on ecosystems in good condition’, but equally some ecosystems depend on agriculture to be in good condition, which also means that they depend on those agricultural systems themselves being in good social and economic condition. The reader could be forgiven for thinking that agriculture is nothing but a problem – an attitude we thought policy had moved on from in the 1990s. And yes, in some environments forests may be the best guard against wildfires, but in others, particularly but not only in the Mediterranean zone, grazing of dry forests and sclerophyllous vegetation is the best way to create a fire-resilient landscape. Again, your vision is not wrong per se, but rather incomplete, but this seeming blindness extends to millions of hectares. The Halada habitats are split between various land cover classes in the document, and that is not its rationale. However this must not be allowed to mask what are often common challenges, as seems to be the case in the proposal at present. What are these challenges? In some cases for sure they are at the destruction-by-intensification end of the spectrum – the document addresses those well. But over millions of hectares of the EU the challenge is abandonment of grazing management, a result of both funadamental economic and social challenges and of unambitious, poorly thought-out or badly-implemented policies in response. From the difficulties posed by land eligibility rules to the inadequacy of agri-environment-climate schemes in some key Member States, many of these issues relate to the CAP; if this Regulation fails to highlight the problems, it will be no surprise if agriculture policy will continue to fail these habitats in the future. But the current lack of seriousness with which these threats to European habitats and species is taken extends also to nature and biodiversity policymaking itself. In a recent exercise we carried out, the lack of precision as to the total habitat resource in some countries’ Article 17 reporting was frankly shocking, while national experts seemed not to have considered how many livestock might be needed to maintain Halada habitats in their countries; needless to say, few countries were collecting relevant data. In summary: the Regulation and its ambition is to be welcomed; it goes awry in a few places (why should all farmland ‘features’ be ungrazed?), but the main issue is the lack of appreciation and therefore of policy recommendations for those agriculture-biodiversity relationships which are not only positive but essential. This gap is made particularly serious by the profound social and economic challenges facing those systems in most EU Member States, challenges which even now are giving rise to poor and worsening condition assessments for the priority habitats and species concerned.
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