Abstract
Agriculture is a major driver of the ongoing biodiversity decline, demanding an urgent transition towards a system that reconciles productivity and profitability with nature conservation; however, where public policies promoting such transitions are in place, their design often poorly fits the relevant biogeophysical systems, decreasing the policies’ expected effectiveness. Spatial scale mismatches are a primary example in this regard. The literature reviewed in this paper, drawing from both ecology and policy studies, suggests to foster policy implementation at the landscape scale, where most functional ecological processes—and the delivery of related ecosystem services—occur on farmland. Two strategies are identified for coordinating policy implementation at the landscape scale: the promotion of farmers’ collective action and the partition of space on an ecologically sound basis through spatial planning. As the new European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2023 is currently being defined, we assess if and how the draft agri-biodiversity legislation includes any of the strategies above. We find no comprehensive uptake of the landscape-scale perspective at the EU level, thereby suggesting that a powerful tool to overcome the CAP underperformance on biodiversity is being overlooked.
Highlights
Published: 13 August 2021Agriculture is the major land use on Earth
This paper provides an overview of this issue based on a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework that integrates the environmental governance theory of scale mismatches (SSMs) with the ecological evidence supporting a landscape-scale perspective for Functional Agri-Biodiversity (FAB) conservation
It is worth noting that many species among the worst affected by the current biodiversity crisis—such as carabid beetles, lady beetles or bumblebees—are those involved in the provision of crucial ecosystem services on which agricultural production and, the livelihood of rural communities rely on [20]
Summary
Agriculture is the major land use on Earth. It covers about 40% of ice-free land and its extent is expected to increase to meet the growing global demand for food [1]. Shaping conservation actions across multiple scales encompassing entire landscapes has been suggested as a valuable strategy for farmland species, including those providing ecosystem services that directly benefit agricultural production— called functional agri-biodiversity or FAB [32,33,34]; this approach is only rarely or poorly retained in policy design, which is still significantly affected by SSMs with their consequent negative implication for policy effectiveness and, sound allocation of public funds. Following on the many criticisms addressed to the previous CAP regarding its limited success in mitigating biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecological processes, we explore to what extent the proposed regulation addresses these issues by tackling SSMs and integrating a landscape-scale perspective This is timely and relevant as the EU Green Deal, the Farm to Fork Strategy and, in particular, the EU. It is critical to shape the CAP policy measures as to align with the macro-strategies of the Union and optimize their effectiveness on FAB conservation, including through careful tuning of their spatial implementation
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