Natura 2000, which is the core pillar of the European Union's biodiversity conservation policy, is an ambitious and complex venture that requires funding to be successful. A major challenge is said ...to be a lack of available funding, and a low uptake of allocated funds is also reported. However, in in-depth analysis has still not been produced to assess the approaches to funding, the reasons for these approaches and their impact regarding the achievement of the aims of Natura 2000. Thus, with this article, we intend to fill this gap. To accomplish this, a case study analysis was carried out in six selected EU Member States: Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK.
In our study, we perceived different approaches which we sum up to two main types of approaches that were present in the Member States to different degrees. The first type was to find the funding necessary for the required activities, and the second was to delay the implementation of Natura 2000. The major reasons for the different approaches were related to domestic political power realities. The funding approaches impacted onto the attractiveness of EU co-financing instruments, and the sustainability of the schemes. Alternative approaches were either absent or declining in importance. The economic benefits were not perceived on the ground.
We conclude that neither a “one size fits all” approach to funding Natura 2000 will work nor will a universal claim for “more money”. Therefore, a successful funding strategy ultimately necessitates effective interventions at institutional levels, the business environment and the local level.
•Two different types of implementation approaches: 1) implement on time; 2) delay implementation.•A plethora of stakeholders is involved in the financing of Natura 2000 implementation.•Domestic power realities impact the availability of funds and their attractiveness.•Financing Natura 2000 has local, national and EU level aspects, short and long term.
While the partisan theory has already rendered initial insight on whether political parties can make a difference in environmental policy, only little is known about their influence on forest policy. ...This article attempts to reveal the role of green, left‐wing and right‐wing parties in the case of German Natura 2000 policy. By testing whether nature conservation or forest interests are strongly supported by the government policy outputs, we test the influence of the different parties that were part of 62 governments from 2004 to 2018 in 16 German Bundesländer. The results show that the German left‐wing parties take up the ideas of the nature conservation sector, while right‐wing parties foster typical forest interests. Furthermore, right‐wing parties very often maintain the policy status quo instead of making policy changes so that the implementation of the biodiversity goal of Natura 2000 often is postponed. The German Green party does not foster nature conservation interests more strongly than the SPD. Coalitions between right‐wing parties increase the chance for policy outputs that tend to favour forest interests.
The catastrophic 2009 wildfires in the Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests of the Central Highlands of Victoria provided an opportunity to gain new insights into the responses to fire by ...various elements of the biota. Ongoing long-term monitoring at a large number of permanent field sites for up to 25 years prior to the fire, together with 10 years of post-fire monitoring, has provided an unparalleled series of datasets on mammal, bird, and plant responses on burned and unburned sites. The empirical studies briefly summarized in this paper show patterns of steep declines in large old trees and declines in site occupancy by arboreal marsupials and birds. These changes contrast markedly with the responses of the two most common species of small mammals (the Agile Antechinus Antechinus agilis and Bush Rat Rattus fuscipes), which recovered within two generations after the fire. Declines in arboreal marsupials, birds and large old trees have also occurred on unburned sites, indicating an ecosystem-wide trend. In general, logging had a greater impact than fire on the majority of groups of birds and plants, particularly post-fire salvage logging that occurred in some areas following the 2009 wildfires. Beyond interactions between fire and post-fire (salvage) logging and their effects on forest biota, we have uncovered evidence of other kinds of interactions in Mountain Ash forests. These include interactions between: (1) the severity of fires and logging history, (2) post-fire bird population recovery and long-term climate and short-term weather conditions, and (3) impacts on forest soils. The structure and landscape composition of the Mountain Ash ecosystem has been radically altered over the last century. This has resulted from the combined impact of several large fires, including the 2009 fires as well as widespread clearfell logging that has been conducted within state forests over the last 50 years. The ecosystem now supports old growth cover that is 1/30th to 1/60th of what it was estimated to have been prior to European settlement. The ongoing decline of key components of the Mountain Ash ecosystem has led to it being classified as Critically Endangered and at high risk of ecosystem collapse. We argue that current forest policy and practices need to better mitigate the effects of fire on this already highly disturbed forest and enhance the possible persistence of species in this ecosystem. Several key strategies are required to do this. First, there is a need to significantly expand the extent of old growth within the Mountain Ash forest estate. This is because fire severity is diminished in such areas. Spatial contagion across old-growth dominated landscapes also may be suppressed relative to landscapes composed primarily of young forest. Allied management strategies include the protection of more mesic parts of Mountain Ash landscapes as these are less likely to burn or at least burn at high severity. Such enhanced protection should include an expanded network of buffers around drainage lines and waterways as these are where fire severity is likely to be lowest and also where old growth elements like large old hollow-bearing trees are more abundant. In addition, all existing living and dead hollow-bearing trees need to be protected by buffers of unlogged forest within wood production forests to promote their standing life and better conserve cavity-dependent fauna such as the Critically Endangered Leadbeater's Possum ('Gymnobelideus leadbeateri') and other declining taxa like the Greater Glider ('Petauroides volans').
•Poorly designed policy that undermines local institutions causes long term harm.•Harmful institutions are created or reinforced by a legacy of ill-thought interventions.•Policy design approaches ...should embed rigorous understanding of local institutions.•Methods for ex-ante exploration of policy interventions are needed for policy design.
Approaches to natural resource management emphasise the importance of involving local people and institutions in order to build capacity, limit costs, and achieve environmental sustainability. Governments worldwide, often encouraged by international donors, have formulated devolution policies and legal instruments that provide an enabling environment for devolved natural resource management. However, implementation of these policies reveals serious challenges. This article explores the effects of limited involvement of local people and institutions in policy development and implementation. An in-depth study of the Forest Policy of Malawi and Village Forest Areas in the Lilongwe district provides an example of externally driven policy development which seeks to promote local management of natural resources. The article argues that policy which has weak ownership by national government and does not adequately consider the complexity of local institutions, together with the effects of previous initiatives on them, can create a cumulative legacy through which destructive resource use practices and social conflict may be reinforced. In short, poorly developed and implemented community based natural resource management policies can do considerably more harm than good. Approaches are needed that enable the policy development process to embed an in-depth understanding of local institutions whilst incorporating flexibility to account for their location-specific nature. This demands further research on policy design to enable rigorous identification of positive and negative institutions and ex-ante exploration of the likely effects of different policy interventions.
Deforestation is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and an important source of global carbon emissions. This means that there are important synergies between climate policy and conservation policy. ...The highest rates of deforestation occur in tropical countries, where much of the land at the forest frontier is managed informally by smallholders and where governance systems tend to be weak. These features must be considered when designing policies to reduce emissions from deforestation such as REDD+. Deforestation is often accompanied by fires that release large amounts of carbon dioxide. These emissions are especially high in the case of peatlands which contain thick layers of carbon-rich matter. In this paper we derive marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves using data from a farmer survey in Sumatra, where rates of peatland deforestation are high. Comparing these results with farmers' stated willingness to accept payment not to clear forest to establish oil palm suggests that REDD+ policies may be more expensive than MAC estimates suggest The extent to which this is true depends on the types of soils being deforested.
•Tropical deforestation causes high rates of biodiversity loss and CO2 emissions.•Much of the land at the forest frontier is managed informally by smallholders.•Opportunity cost (OC) of avoided deforestation by farmers in Sumatra is estimated.•Payments requested by these farmers exceed OC estimated from survey data.•Our results have implications for the design of policies on avoided deforestation.
Estimating the profitability trends of poplar plantations under current sectorial public policies. Investments in poplar plantations in the Po valley (Northern Italy), the most important segment of ...timber production for the Italian forest-based sector, are undergoing a decline since more than two decades. The investment level is influenced by both economic variables directly related to the production, such as timber prices, management costs, and land costs, as well as external variables indirectly related to it, such as the opportunity cost of competitive agricultural productions, environmental restrictions, and the presence of subsidies. This paper presents the results of an analysis of trends in timber investment returns from poplar plantations in the Po Valley. In specific, we estimated how these returns have changed in the last 15 years (2001-2015) as a result of the evolution of the key variables of cost and timber price, and assuming a representative plantation management regime. The results show that, in the considered period, poplar timber investments have had a significant decline, with estimated Internal Rate of Returns dropped of 22.1%-44.2% from 2001 to 2015. In specific, the Internal Rates of Returns, when defined and in the base case scenario, ranged from values between 7.1% and 14.0% (2001) to 4.4%-11.0% (2015). Poplar plantations are offering interesting income opportunities only when average timber prices are high, while in all the other cases the investments are at the threshold of economic viability or even negative. The decreased profitability, together with the high variability of potential financial returns, are negatively influencing the attitude towards the investments in poplar plantations. These results are discussed in the light of the recent sectorial public policies. In particular, we focused on the Measures to support plantations of the regional Rural Development Plans, which often proved to be decisive for establishing new plantations and crucial in (de)stabilizing the sector. The lack of a strategic coordination among the northern Italian Regions and the discontinuity of subsidies schemes have contributed to the destabilization of the market.
This paper examines efforts at forest conservation and management since colonial times in the 'High Forest Zone'; the southern part of present day Ghana. It provides a detailed historiology of ...attempts to apply scientific forestry principles and depicts how these ideals
have crumbled in the face of material, financial and politico-economic constraints that have largely determined how control and management have unfolded in practice. Thus, the paper illustrates how principles of scientific forestry have come to follow, rather than precede and guide, practices
of forest exploitation, and how investments in forest management and silvicultural practices aimed at nurturing the long-term productive value of the forests have been few and far between and rendered ineffective by weaknesses in their theoretical basis and a lack of forest ecological data.
Our account of the history of scientific forestry in Ghana is relevant to scholars of empire forestry through its attention to what notions of scientific forestry meant in practice, but also to today's policy makers and practitioners in areas such as timber legality verification, forest
certification and decentralised forest management where the challenges discussed in this paper live on.
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