Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SHOWCASE (SHOWCASing synergies between agriculture, biodiversity and Ecosystem services to help farmers capitalising on native biodiversity)
Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2023-10-31
Biodiversity conservation is firmly embedded in EU legislation and regulatory frameworks. There is increasing recognition of the pivotal role biodiversity plays in maintaining productive farming systems through the pollination, natural pest regulation and soil services it provides. Yet, practices aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity often adversely affect native and domestic biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Farmland biodiversity is steeply declining in most regions of Europe, and society at large is increasingly concerned about the loss of public goods, such as iconic wildlife and cultural landscapes. The evidence base underlying effective biodiversity conservation on farmland has steadily strengthened, with studies demonstrating that management can increase biodiversity and enhance the delivery of a range of regulating and supporting ecosystem services. However, this has not yet resulted in adoption of biodiversity management by the farming sector at a scale sufficient for significant biodiversity benefits. SHOWCASE aims “to make biodiversity an integral part of European farming by identifying effective incentives to invest in biodiversity in diverse socio-ecological contexts, providing the evidence that these incentives result in biodiversity increases and biodiversity-based, socio-economic benefits, and communicating both the principles and best practices to as wide a range of stakeholders as possible.”
Our specific objectives are:
• To establish a long-lasting European multi-actor network of Experimental Biodiversity Areas (EBAs) for the development, testing and showcasing, together with farmers, of approaches to effectively integrate biodiversity into farm management across different European landscapes.
• To identify, along a broad gradient of land use from intensification to abandonment, which economic, agro-ecological and social factors incentivise farmers to actively support biodiversity on their farms.
• To establish, with farmers, a strong evidence base on public and private goods, as well as costs, associated with promoting native biodiversity, in a range of European farming systems and socio-economic contexts.
• To co-develop with stakeholders, methods, tools and indicators to monitor and evaluate biodiversity and ecosystem services against operational biodiversity targets at appropriate temporal and spatial scales and governance levels, and establish harmonized sets of data on native biodiversity.
• To develop and implement inspirational narratives to communicate the benefits of biodiversity to farmers, and beyond, and to make available easily accessible information on best practices for integration of biodiversity in farm management.
Our specific objectives are:
• To establish a long-lasting European multi-actor network of Experimental Biodiversity Areas (EBAs) for the development, testing and showcasing, together with farmers, of approaches to effectively integrate biodiversity into farm management across different European landscapes.
• To identify, along a broad gradient of land use from intensification to abandonment, which economic, agro-ecological and social factors incentivise farmers to actively support biodiversity on their farms.
• To establish, with farmers, a strong evidence base on public and private goods, as well as costs, associated with promoting native biodiversity, in a range of European farming systems and socio-economic contexts.
• To co-develop with stakeholders, methods, tools and indicators to monitor and evaluate biodiversity and ecosystem services against operational biodiversity targets at appropriate temporal and spatial scales and governance levels, and establish harmonized sets of data on native biodiversity.
• To develop and implement inspirational narratives to communicate the benefits of biodiversity to farmers, and beyond, and to make available easily accessible information on best practices for integration of biodiversity in farm management.
The multi-actor network of Experimental Biodiversity Areas (EBAs) has successfully been established in 10 European landscapes and has been used to develop and test, together with farmers, approaches to integrate biodiversity into farm management. So far, the showcasing of these approaches has been done mainly through carrying out research in the field together with farmers but the first papers have been published that form the basis for larger scale dissemination. Analyses of the regulatory and incentive instruments for biodiversity management on farms suggest that there is a need for public policies, including the CAP, to address more specifically the determinants encouraging biodiversity-friendly farm management. This entails reflecting culture-specific perspectives and incorporating experiential knowledge into multilevel policy design processes, as well as offering regionally adapted advice on measure implementation and biodiversity impacts. The first studies examining the public and private goods, and costs associated with promoting native biodiversity show that trade-offs may occur between profit and public goods delivery. Analyses from a wider range of landscape contexts are underway so that more general conclusions can be drawn about the provision of public goods, private benefits and costs associated with promoting native biodiversity. SHOWCASE has published a first paper demonstrating that it is possible to estimate habitat quality for flowers and bees using imagery from drones. These results represent an important step towards the development of automated methods for biodiversity monitoring in grasslands across large spatial scales. Another approach, that has been tested successfully in Portugal, Romania and the Netherlands uses key performance indicators (KPIs) based on easily quantifiable land-use characteristics for large-scale monitoring of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. This approach identified a KPI based on the percentage semi-natural habitat as most strongly correlated with landscape-level biodiversity. Finally, SHOWCASE has described the prevailing conservation and farming narratives in the agro-biodiversity arena and argues that scientists need to better position themselves with respect to main narratives that are being used by various stakeholders. If scientists do not convincingly communicate about the implications of their evidence, other interested stakeholders with other interests will drive the conversations.
At the time SHOWCASE started, the state of the art in biodiversity research suggested that more biodiverse agroecosystems function better and are more productive and resilient. However, most biodiversity studies, even those that were carried out in real-world landscapes, focused on the benefits and did not consider the direct costs associated with enhancing biodiversity or the opportunity costs. For a farmer both the benefits and the (opportunity) costs are relevant. SHOWCASE studies are unraveling, for the first time, the net economic consequences of integrating biodiversity into farm management and are showing a more nuanced picture. Results so far, from two Experimental Biodiversity Areas (EBAs), indicate that integrating biodiversity into farm management has concrete benefits, but most of these benefits are public goods from which the farmer does not profit economically. Private benefits, mostly enhanced crop yields, are also observed but these are outweighed by the costs of enhancing biodiversity. In other EBAs, and therefore agricultural landscapes with other contexts, the situation may be different and the next two years SHOWCASE expects to develop a more comprehensive and complete picture of the net benefits of integrating biodiversity into farm management. These first results do however point out an important barrier towards adoption of biodiversity management by farmers. It highlights the need for financial incentives that make biodiversity management on farms competitive with conventional crop production. As such it links the success of integrating biodiversity management on farms directly to large-scale drivers of agricultural land-use such as global trade, biodiversity-based business models, the agricultural value chain and consumer behaviour as well as agricultural and conservation policies. These are (partly) being considered in ongoing studies and analyses in SHOWCASE and towards the end of the project we hope to be able to provide an integral view which social, economic or ecological aspect is the most effective route towards incorporating biodiversity into mainstream farming.