SHOWCASing synergies between agriculture, biodiversity and Ecosystem services to help farmers capitalising on native biodiversity

For achieving politically set goals, a range of instruments exists. These are techniques, ways or procedures used by different political levels to influence economic, social or spatial processes. By analysing literature, we created an overview of instruments motivating European farmers to conserve biodiversity. While the EU nature directives represent the backbone of EU biodiversity legislation, also the basic requirements under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) operate de facto as a regulatory baseline, impacting ca. 84% of the EU’s farmland. Yet, the potential of EU regulation and incentives to support biodiversity friendly agricultural practices under the CAP, remains largely unrealised. In the future CAP, the new conditionality might have positive impacts on biodiversity provision. Within the future eco-schemes, 20 of 45 practices proposed by the European Commission explicitly target biodiversity, with agro-ecology, agroforestry and high nature value farming having it as a central objective. Taking a deeper look into incentives, we found a broad bundle of schemes operating mainly as Payments for Environmental Services to achieve biodiversity objectives. Their main areas of biodiversity action are to: i) extensify intensive agroecosystems, ii) maintain the management of extensive agroecosystems facing abandonment and/or intensification, and iii) maintain or restore agricultural habitats. Promising initiatives come from the private and public sector, and include measure-based and increasingly result-based approaches. The uptake of such incentives is determined by farm characteristics, farmers’ intrinsic motivations and the societal, community and landscape context they are placed in.