Thematic Group on Enhancing Biodiversity on Farmland for Improved Resilience
This Thematic Group is an opportunity to share experiences on the required changes in the design, implementation and uptake of initiatives, to upscale the delivery of biodiversity outcomes, and improve the sustainability and resilience of farming.
Food production and farming practices can have both positive and negative impacts on biodiversity. The interactions between farming and biodiversity therefore play a critical role in the resilience of food production and sustainable resource management. This can take place through supporting the pollination of crops and the control of pests and diseases, contributing to productive soils, nutrient and carbon cycles, and water quality, and improving the resilience of farming systems to climate change through helping to mitigate the effects of droughts and floods. However, biodiversity continues to decline, particularly on farmland.
The recently agreed Nature Restoration Law (NRL) has an overarching, legally binding requirement to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land (and 20% of sea areas) by 2030, and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050. There are requirements for Member States to put in place agricultural measures to demonstrate increasing trends in various indicators (grassland butterfly index, share of agricultural land with high diversity landscape features, farmland bird index) as well as reversing the decline in pollinator populations, and requirements to restore drained agricultural peatlands and ensure adequate strategies are in place to manage grasslands.
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a major source of funding to support the management and restoration of biodiversity in rural areas, and the CAP Strategic Plans (CSPs) are an important vehicle for achieving the NRL requirements in Member States. However, despite the fact that incentives have been in place for farmers to improve biodiversity on farmland for many decades, this has not been sufficient to achieve the scale of improvements required.
This Thematic Group (TG) is an opportunity for you to be part of a committed group of experts and relevant stakeholders that will examine what changes are required in terms of both scheme design and implementation to encourage greater uptake by farmers of the right practices in the right places and at the landscape scale. This should enable a significant increase in the delivery of biodiversity outcomes on the ground to improve the sustainability of farming practices, the restoration and establishment of habitats, and the resilience of farming systems.
Objectives
The objectives of this TG are to:
- Explore how to improve biodiversity outcomes on farmland through greater spatial coordination of actions for habitats and species, including improving the connectivity between farmland and the wider countryside (use of different interventions, scheme design, scheme implementation, measuring outcomes).
- Discuss how to incentivise uptake by farmers of practices and investments to benefit biodiversity and increase the resilience of their farming systems, and the benefits of working collaboratively with other farmers at the landscape scale.
- Examine the role of the advisory services and how these can best be deployed to achieve the outcomes required.
The meetings will be held in English, without interpretation.
If you have any question, please contact us at thematicgroup1@eucapnetwork.eu.
To follow the work of this Thematic Group, please visit this page regularly, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and follow us on social media (#BiodiversityForResilience).
You can find useful resources about this theme further down in this page and in our Publications section.
