The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU reflects the increasing need for mitigating the negative impacts of farming on the environment. Agri-environmental-climatic schemes of the Rural Development Programme consist in financial compensation for losses caused by environmentally-friendly farming (limiting the supply of nutrients, postponed harvest, reducing the use of pesticides, etc.). This motivates farmers to such behaviour externally, which leads to a stronger internal motivation, e.g. to knowledge of the purpose and to trust in the aims of agri-environmental support. The preparation of regulations for agri-environmental-climatic schemes for 2014–2020 took nearly five years, during which dozens of analyses and work meetings, consultations and hundreds of calculations were made. Despite all efforts, several dilemmas on a societal level remain determining the final effects on biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes. The paper focuses on identifying the main barriers in effectively implementing the EU policy and explains their origin and effects. It also explores the possibilities of overcoming these barriers, including e.g. lack of funding of the targeted treatment of all valuable grasslands, the impossibility of recovery of traditional farming methods, gaps in the knowledge of causal links between human intervention and effects on nature and landscape, lack of trust in the purpose of the policy, lack of skills in acquiring consent, etc. There are several promising ways to further improve the agri-environmental policy regarding to the identified barriers. Improvement of the capacity of stakeholders to reach agreement on implementation of the policy has a great potential especially in increasing internal motivation to participate in agri-environmental-climatic schemes.
Pražan, J., Čámská, K.
Zprávy Čes. Bot. Spol., Praha, 50, Mater. 26: p. 101-114, 2015, ISSN 1212-3323
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