The European Union spends about A$5.6 billion a year on schemes aimed at encouraging less-intensive farming in order to increase biodiversity, improve water quality etcetera on farm. But it has delivered very little tangible environmental benefit according to a recent news feature in Nature by John Whitfield titled ‘How green was my subsidy’.
One of the problems according to the feature article is that “most of Europe’s agi-environmental schemes have very vague goals.”
And sometimes research results indicate that wildlife is not adverse to a bit of farming. For example, one of the first scientific audits of an agri-environment scheme, showed that in Holland a project intended to help ground-nesting meadow birds by delaying the mowing of fields was having no effect – in this region some birds actually seemed to prefer intensively farmed fields.
David Kleijn, an ecologist from Wageningen University in Holland, has spearheaded the research effort to document the benefits in a rigorous way.
This work has concluded that:
“Plants showed the most widespread benefits, with higher diversity on scheme fields in
every country except the Netherlands. Bees benefited in Germany and Switzerland, grasshoppers and crickets in Britain, and spiders in Spain. In cases where the biodiversity went up, nearly all the beneficiaries were common species; only one scheme – a Spanish programme aimed at making arable fields bird-friendly by leaving winter stubble – showed a positive effect on endangered species, one of which was the thekla lark (Galerida theklae).”
The Nature news feature article really emphasis the extent to which Europeans like to mix their nature and farming with the conclusion:
“Such schemes may not be the best way to promote the preservation of endangered species. … Europe might do better to allow some areas to revert to a state close to wilderness while others are intensively farmed, and then to manage the whole system so as to maximize leisure, flood protection, and water quality.
… biodiversity benefits would accrue even if not particularly targeted. But Europeans like farmland landscapes, and will probably continue to try and convince themselves that there are practical ways to keep areas that are rich in wildlife and pleasing to the eye, which also produce cheap food and don
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I think the issue here is more the quality of the programme rather than the aim. If the funds were broadly spread without consideration of local threshholds then little would come of it. This is especially so if the projects fail to recognise the positive effects that farming practices can have.
There is really very little point in trying to ‘improve’ the habitat value of a regularly cultivated field in a landscape dominated by such fields. Better to improve the outcomes of those parts that already contribute, or those parts that can augment a contribution made elswhere in the district.
But having said that, there are numerous examples where wildlife have been almost totally excluded for up to a century (a multiple local extinction?) and then seeing the species list almost fully restored with low levels of input. And some have had some serious connectivity issues that were overcome by recolonising species.
Densely settled Europe and sparsely settled Australia are very different. A big part of nature in Europe is completly artificial-Hedgerows for example. What nature conservation is preserving with efforts on these artifial ecosystems is human created ecosystems that came into existence over the last thousand years of so.
Most Australian ecosystems have been shaped by Aboriginal burning and hunting. The landscape ecologists have it right – understanding history is a first essential in building a realistic model of any ecosystem. Biologists, zooming in on their favorite photogenic taxon, can get it badly wrong. Remember the three blind men and the elephant? Humanities rule, okay?
Your right Davey, but the scientists say it this way: historical sciences rule OK.
One aspect of history that is often ignored is that natural ecosystems are not in balance. They change with time, sometimes dramatically and change (such as fire burns) can be healthy, even essential. Conservation efforts need to recognise this history of change. In fact even extinctions are completely natural.
Okay Detribe – historical science sounds good to me. How about interdisciplinary?
The need for improving the habitat potential of cultivated fields in europe arises, as others have stated, because of the high proportion of human dominated land = 65% human dominated in Europe (source UNEP). 15% undisturbed land in Europe it says, but that must include vast, sparsely populated areas in Nth East Europe. (‘undisturbed’ = roadless chunks of 100,000 ha)
“Though far from natural, suburban residential areas and abandoned industrial landscapes are increasingly recognized as important reservoirs of wildlife often more so than neighboring agricultural landscapes. In England and elsewhere in Europe, a high proportion of the rare and endangered species of invertebrates and flowering plants such as orchids live in former urban industrial sites. Green strips of land either side of highways and railroads often act as migration
corridors for wildlife through urban areas.”
http://atlas.aaas.org/pdf/71-74.pdf
Not to open a debate on organics(!) but recall a recent UK study showing increased biodiversity aroung organic fields.
All this talk of hedgerows:
And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason.
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter.
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
And it makes me wonder.
Were LZ greenies?
Didya know there’s a burning movement in the UK that sets hedges on fire?
But this could cause a mass extinction of May Queens.
I don’t mind admitting that my favourite song is Kashmir and that LZ dominate my CD collection. However, greeneies they were most assuredly not. Their environmentalism was as superficial as Midnight Oil’s; another band that dominates my centre-console.
European agriculture cannot compete on the open market for the production of food, and on the other hand, they can’t let the ag sector wither away into bankruptcy, so their only option is to make their farmers “hired gardeners” instead and paying them “environmental” subsidies. The virtue of this scheme is that the subsidies are called “environmental,” i.e., “good,” instead of “agricultural,” i.e., bad.
There is a glaring omission in the article that led to this discussion. They failed to measure a crucial outcome: the aesthetic outcome.
European farmers are paid, literally, to grow weeds, insects and birds. If you like the appearance of weeds, insects and birds, then you have a visible outcome–and, being primarily aesthetic, an outcome which of course the authors are unable to “measure.”
In conclusion, I submit that aim of the entire scheme, though called “environmental,” is aesthetic and that attempts to determine beauty by quantifying biodiversity is simply a fundamental category mistake.
Schiller.
My good continental European farmer friend said to me last year “farming is half politics and half agricultural science”. What I gather he meant was it’s half subsidy and half sales cash flow.