Technical insights from Effect

PUBLIC DELIVERABLES — Report on the economic performance of existing schemes considering potential trade-offs and synergies when it comes to ecosystem services output.

PUBLIC DELIVERABLES — Ecological indicators of agri-environmental contracts and how they can be used in the assessment of environmental effectiveness.

REPORT — What can farmers and nature get out of it? Insights from 15 countries. Eco-schemes are a new instrument under the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), initially foreseen to be implemented from 2021 onwards, now postponed to 2023. The legal basis is the Strategic Plan Regulation1, which is shaping the new green architecture of the CAP for the programming period 2023-2027. After its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union on 6th December 2021 the new CAP became official EU law. Participation in the schemes for the climate and the environment, called eco-schemes, is voluntary for farmers. Only farmers that are eligible for the basic payment under the 1st pillar, now called Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) can get funding for undertaking eco-scheme measures.

CASE STUDIES — EFFECT Stakeholder Engagement: results. This paper has been prepared as part of EFFECT UK Case Study #5 Biodiversity Offsetting to explore farmers, land managers and environmental advisors’ perspectives on various aspects of the Environment Bill and associated 25 Year Environment Plan. We undertook an online survey to assess:

• The strengths and weaknesses of the current AES
• The new AES proposed under the Environment Plan
• Perspectives on biodiversity net gain
• The design and implementation of biodiversity offset markets

ACADEMIC PAPER — Romania has traditionally dealt with forest ecosystem services (FES) using a regulatory process of designing forest management plans (FMPs). We set an analytical framework to assess the integrated approach between FMPs, Natura 2000 biodiversity conservation network, and the forest certification system.

ACADEMIC PAPER — The environmental benefits from Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes can often be enhanced if private land managers are induced to enrol land in a spatially coordinated manner.

ACADEMIC PAPER — Tree-lines and alleys are expected to operate as migration enhancing corridors for habitat-demanding species, but their functionality is limited by the set of ecological filters. We use multiple plant traits related to dispersal and establishment to identify the limiting filters for forest plants in the rural landscape of Estonia.

ACADEMIC PAPER — Research to investigate the habitat and host specificity of epiphytic lichens colonization of ten common tree species in three contrasting habitat types across 19 Estonian landscapes.

ACADEMIC PAPER — We investigate the use of private funding for biodiversity conservation through an offset market. The environmental objective is to increase some measure of biodiversity in a region (“net gain”) despite the loss of land for new housing. Farmers create biodiversity credits by changing their land management, then sell these credits to housebuilders who are required to more-than offset the impacts of new house building on a biodiversity. A general result is established for the impacts on price and quantity in the offset market as the net gain target is make more ambitious. Combining an economic model of market operation with an ecological model linking land management to bird populations, we then examine the impacts on equilibrium price and quantity of offsets as the target level of net gain is increased for a case study site in Scotland. Changes in the spatial pattern of gains and losses in our biodiversity index are also shown.