Solutions for a Win-Win Partnership between Agriculture and Biodiversity

Biodiversity underpins a number of ecological processes crucial to agricultural production. Agro-landscapes are instrumental for the conservation of biodiversity, including wild and domestic species. A key challenge for European agriculture and conservation policies is to develop land-use strategies that reconcile agricultural production and farmland biodiversity. In this perspective, a range of agri-environmental policies including the Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) have been developed and implemented. However, over the past 25 years of implementation, their effectiveness for enhancing biodiversity is debatable. Reasons for this low effectiveness include the insufficient uptake of the most constraining policies and the lack of tailoring to different contexts, stakeholders and issues. Farming involves a range of stakeholders : farmers, of course, but also food manufacturers and retailers, consumers, residents of rural areas, naturalists…. Each has an interest in particular ....