The Accidental Conservationists

Those who study ecology become accustomed to a relationship between the humans and biodiversity: the more humans affect an ecosystem, the more they reduce biodiversity.  Yet, there are periods in human history when this was not the case.  By learning from the ways in which humans affected ecosystems in these periods and their motivations for doing so, there are opportunities to recreate these interactions and benefit biodiversity.  Before the industrial revolution many land management practices increased the heterogeneity of (variety in) the landscape.  Examples include the planting and maintenance of hedgerows to divide fields before enclosure and the maintenance of coppiced woods to provide fuel for small scale iron production.  It may be tempting to look back on the relevant individuals as purposefully working to increase biodiversity but in reality it was usually coincidence that the practices which were economically viable for land managers also benefited biodiversity.  More recently, throughout the 20^th Century farmers were incentivised by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to reduce this heterogeneity, to remove hedgerows and form larger, more uniform fields.  Farmers did this as it made economic sense and one consequence has been the great reduction in farm land birds (presumably mirrored across other taxa).  Viewing the history of our landscape as the history of selfish individuals making economically motivated decisions (some of which benefitted biodiversity and provided ecosystem services and some of which harmed biodiversity and decreased the provision of ecosystem services) opens up new opportunities for conservation.  The ecosystem services movement allows policy makers to appreciate the value of conservation.

It is for these reasons that the leaders of the country’s biggest conservation organsiations wrote an open letter to the Times with the subheading ‘Farmers are vital guardians of our landscape and wildlife, but they need financial backing to be able to do this’ in responce to threats to funding for angry-environment projects.

Just as individuals once helped nature because it helped them (divide fields or grow timber to use as fuel), helping nature must once again help farmers (gain funding from agri-environment schemes).  Farmers must be paid to help nature.  But who should pay?  I think that it is only fair that everyone who benefits from the farmer’s actions, which is...everyone, should pay.  You already pay farmers to farm, through the Common Agricultural Policy, surely farmers should be offering you a benefit in return?  Benefits like increasing bird populations for you to enjoy, ensuring the water running off their land is clean so that your water bills don’t increase to cover the cost of water treatment works to remove pollutants or managing land to increase carbon sequestration so that the costs of climate change, which you pay, are reduced ever so slightly.  These ‘public benefits’ are what farmers are paid to attempt to bring about through the one quarter of the CAP system which subsidises agri-environment projects.  However, it must be noted that this whole system relies on farmers either being paid to carry out actions which are known to bring about benefits or for bring those benefits about.   This may seem a trivial difference but currently many farmers are paid to carry out actions which are thought to bring about benefits where, infact, they may result in no benefits.  This problem could be solved by rewarding farmers for results rather than efforts where the effectiveness of the efforts is not well known.

Before I finish this blog I wish to add some notes of a more personal flavour.  So far I have written from the perspective of a theoretical economist, assuming individuals to be rational.  I accept (as economists do) that this assumption is flawed, not all individuals are completely rational.  For example, many farmers define their job as producing food not as a means to earn an income (which they happen to earn by producing and selling food).  Such individuals may rather use every available hectare of their land for producing food than for set aside a hectare for Skylark Patches even if the profit they would generate by ‘maintaining’ Skylark Patches was greater than the profit they would generate through farming that land.  I strongly believe that individuals should not be criticised for not acting ‘rationally’, for not attributing the same values to things as you.  Whereas the RSPB might prefer Skylarks, a farmer might prefer carrots in his field over extra money in his pocket.  On the other hand, some farmers may carry out interventions which increase biodiversity (or provide ecosystem services) when doing so is a net economic cost.  Such individuals prefer birds in their fields (and nearby land) to money in their pocket.  Therefore, in my opinion, the most that conservation organisations can do is educate, to make sure that the payments for agri-environment schemes reflect the value of the public goods they generate or protect and to make sure that land owners are aware of the options available to them.