The farming future...

Amanda Tuke asks Gavin Siriwardena, Head Ecologist at BTO (British Trust for Ornithology), what the changing landscape of agri-environment incentives might mean for bird conservation projects on farms.

Amanda: What have conservationists learned from the implementation of earlier agri-environment incentives – Countryside Stewardship (CS) – which farmers could apply for within funding under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy?

Gavin: We have built up evidence of which CS management options were working well for farmland birds and which weren’t, and were continuing to roll out new options that should work better, but to understand what effect land management has on bird populations, you do need options to be running for five years, at least. CS started in 2016 and has not yet been properly evaluated.

Amanda: How is the proposed shift from CS to the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS), originally planned for 2024, likely to impact on bird conservation?

Gavin: ELMS is based on the idea of reforming subsidies and agrienvironment together to provide public money for “public goods” (ie. goods that can be enjoyed by all, and are thought not to be adequately incentivised by the market, such as clean air and clean water – and wildlife), which has to be a positive change, in principle. The difficult thing with ELMS is that while the ‘public goods’ approach could be a positive one, we don’t have the details of the proposed scheme to evaluate it properly or any sense of the level of funding, or what it would mean for the farms with existing farmland options that are having a positive impact onbirds.

Amanda: We have heard recently that the Government is reviewing the planned implementation of ELMS with some reports that it might even be scrapped. Is that a good or bad thing for birds and other nature conservation?

Gavin: We definitely shouldn’t put ELMS on a pedestal as the solution – the devil may be in details that have not been published, but at this stage, we don’t know what alternatives are being considered. A return to area-based payments alone, unless effective and monitored environmental enhancement rules were built in, could be disastrous. On the other hand, removing all support for farmers, and leaving it ‘to the market’, is likely to lead both to renewed farmland intensification in some areas and many farmers going out of business, elsewhere; so that some of our most ecologically important farmland is lost, which would be equally disastrous for farmland birds. In the meantime, we at BTO will continue to do whatever we can to ensure that future agri-environment policy is based on sound evidence about effects on birds.

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