H2020 SHOWCASE Project: Showcasing synergies between agriculture, biodiversity, and ecosystem services to help farmers harness native biodiversity
- Type Project
- Status Firmado
- Execution 2020 -2025
- Assigned Budget 7.999.771,25 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing H2020
- Project website Proyecto SHOWCASE
Little is known about what effectively motivates farmers to integrate biodiversity into their daily farm management. Furthermore, there are few studies demonstrating that biodiversity-based approaches generate benefits, and this evidence is poorly disseminated. The EU-funded SHOWCASE project seeks to shed light on these issues by reviewing and evaluating the ecological effectiveness of various economic and social incentives for implementing biodiversity management on farms, as well as examining their acceptance by farmers and the public.
The project focuses on results-based incentives, participation in biodiversity monitoring through citizen science, and biodiversity-based business models. It will also design communication strategies tailored to farmers and other key stakeholders operating in different socioeconomic and environmental conditions.
The multi-stakeholder network of Biodiversity Experimental Areas (BEAs) has been successfully established in ten European landscapes and has been used to develop and test, together with farmers, approaches for integrating biodiversity into farm management. To date, the dissemination of these approaches has been primarily through field research in collaboration with farmers, but the first articles have already been published, laying the groundwork for larger-scale dissemination. Analyses of regulatory and incentive instruments for on-farm biodiversity management suggest the need for public policies, including the CAP, to more specifically address the determinants that encourage biodiversity-friendly farm management.
This involves reflecting specific cultural perspectives and incorporating experiential knowledge into multilevel policymaking processes, as well as offering regionally tailored advice on the implementation of measures and their impacts on biodiversity. Early studies examining public and private goods, and the costs associated with promoting native biodiversity, show that there can be trade-offs between benefits and the provision of public goods.
Analyses of a wider range of landscape contexts are being conducted to draw more general conclusions about the provision of public goods, private benefits, and costs associated with promoting native biodiversity. SHOWCASE has published a first paper demonstrating that it is possible to estimate habitat quality for flowers and bees using drone imagery. These results represent an important step toward developing automated methods for large-scale biodiversity monitoring in grasslands. Another approach, successfully tested in Portugal, Romania, and the Netherlands, uses key performance indicators (KPIs) based on easily quantifiable land-use characteristics for large-scale biodiversity monitoring in agricultural landscapes. This approach identified a KPI based on the percentage of semi-natural habitat as the most strongly correlated with landscape-level biodiversity.
Finally, SHOWCASE has described the prevailing narratives about conservation and agriculture in the field of agrobiodiversity and argues that scientists need to better position themselves vis-à-vis the main narratives being used by various key actors. If scientists do not communicate convincingly about the implications of their evidence, other stakeholders with different interests will drive the conversations.
Biodiversity conservation is firmly entrenched in EU legislation and regulatory frameworks. The critical role biodiversity plays in maintaining productive agricultural systems through pollination, natural pest regulation, and the services it provides to the soil is increasingly recognized. However, practices aimed at improving agricultural productivity often negatively impact native and domestic biodiversity, as well as associated ecosystem services. Farmland biodiversity is declining dramatically in most European regions, and society at large is increasingly concerned about the loss of public goods, such as iconic fauna and flora and cultural landscapes.
The evidence base supporting effective biodiversity conservation on farmland has been steadily strengthened, with studies demonstrating that management can increase biodiversity and enhance the provision of various regulating and supporting ecosystem services. However, this has not yet translated into the adoption of biodiversity management by the agricultural sector on a scale sufficient to achieve significant biodiversity benefits. SHOWCASE aims to “mainstream biodiversity into European agriculture by identifying effective incentives for biodiversity investment in diverse socio-ecological contexts, demonstrating that these incentives result in biodiversity increases and biodiversity-based socio-economic benefits, and communicating principles and best practices to as many stakeholders as possible.”
Our specific objectives are: To establish a sustainable European multi-stakeholder network of Biodiversity Experimental Areas (EBAs) for the development, testing, and presentation, together with farmers, of approaches to effectively integrate biodiversity into agricultural management across different European landscapes. To identify, along a wide land-use gradient, from intensification to abandonment, which economic, agroecological, and social factors incentivize farmers to actively support biodiversity on their farms. To establish, together with farmers, a solid evidence base on the public and private benefits, as well as costs, associated with promoting native biodiversity across diverse European farming systems and socio-economic contexts.
Co-develop with stakeholders methods, tools, and indicators to monitor and assess biodiversity and ecosystem services in relation to operational biodiversity objectives at appropriate temporal and spatial scales and governance levels, and establish harmonized data sets on native biodiversity. Develop and implement inspiring narratives to communicate the benefits of biodiversity to farmers and other groups, and to facilitate access to information on best practices for integrating biodiversity into agricultural management.
The slow adoption of biodiversity-promoting practices by the agricultural sector is believed to be due to three interrelated issues.
First, we know little about what incentives actually motivate farmers to integrate biodiversity into daily farm management.
Second, few studies so far have produced evidence that biodiversity-based approaches produce benefits in terms of key variables for farmers (yield, profit).
Third, there is a significant communication gap between scientists researching biodiversity-based agricultural practices and the farmers who must implement them. To overcome these barriers, SHOWCASE will review and test the effectiveness of a variety of economic and social incentives for implementing biodiversity management in agricultural operations and examine farmer and public acceptance.
The focus will be on three promising approaches:
- Incentives based on results.
- Participation in biodiversity monitoring with citizen science.
- Biodiversity-based business models. SHOWCASE will co-produce, together with stakeholders, robust interdisciplinary evidence of the agroecological and socioeconomic benefits of biodiversity management in 10 contrasting farming systems across Europe.
SHOWCASE will also design communication strategies tailored to farmers and other key stakeholders operating in different socioeconomic and environmental conditions. SHOWCASE will develop a multi-stakeholder network of 10 Biodiversity Experimental Areas in contrasting European farming systems that will be used for in-situ research on biodiversity incentives and evidence of benefits, as well as for knowledge exchange. This network will be used to identify and test biodiversity indicators and targets relevant to all stakeholders and use them in a learning-by-doing approach to enhance the benefits of on-farm biodiversity management, both within and outside the network.
When SHOWCASE was initiated, the state of the art in biodiversity research suggested that more biodiverse agroecosystems perform better, are more productive, and are more resilient. However, most biodiversity studies, even those conducted in real landscapes, focused on benefits and did not consider the direct costs associated with biodiversity enhancement or opportunity costs. For a farmer, both benefits and (opportunity) costs are relevant. SHOWCASE studies are unraveling, for the first time, the net economic consequences of integrating biodiversity into farm management and paint a more nuanced picture. Results to date, from two Biodiversity Experimental Areas (BEAs), indicate that integrating biodiversity into farm management has concrete benefits, but most of these benefits are public goods from which farmers do not benefit economically.
Private benefits are also observed, primarily increased crop yields, but these are outweighed by the costs of improving biodiversity. In other Biodiversity Areas (BAs), and therefore in agricultural landscapes with different contexts, the situation may be different, and over the next two years, SHOWCASE hopes to develop a more comprehensive and complete picture of the net benefits of integrating biodiversity into agricultural management. However, these initial results highlight a significant barrier to farmers' adoption of biodiversity management.
They highlight the need for financial incentives that make on-farm biodiversity management competitive with conventional agricultural production. As such, they link the success of integrating on-farm biodiversity management directly to large-scale drivers of agricultural land use, such as global trade, biodiversity-based business models, the agricultural value chain and consumer behavior, as well as agricultural and conservation policies. These are being (partially) considered in ongoing studies and analyses within SHOWCASE, and by the end of the project, we hope to be able to provide a comprehensive view of which social, economic, or ecological aspect represents the most effective route for incorporating biodiversity into conventional agriculture.
- WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY (WU)
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