Abstract

Policy goals have been defined to enhance farmland biodiversity while ensuring food security for a growing world population. However, implementing the same policy measures uniformly in different regions can undermine their effectiveness due to the pronounced variability in relationships between farmland biodiversity and agricultural production. Tailoring policy measures to match the characteristics of specific farming systems is a prerequisite to increase the policies’ limited effectiveness. I present an empirically grounded concept that synthesises the complex interactions between farmland biodiversity and agriculture considering the full range of extensive small-scale to intensive large-scale farming systems. This conceptualisation provides the basis to tailor policy measures so that they best contribute to the transformative vision of reviving interactions between biodiversity and agriculture. The tailoring rests on a) the current state of farmland biodiversity b) the current level of agricultural production and c) the underlying cause-effect relationships. I will discuss the tailoring of policy measures using examples of farming systems in Europe, Africa and other world regions. The concept helps to evaluate if and under which conditions existing policy measures are most effective to realise the transformative vision. It provides a synthesis framework to discuss solutions developed and tested in stakeholder-centred initiatives such as on-farm experimentation or living laboratories at landscape scale experimenting on real farms with farmers and other food system actors. This will provide the necessary spatially explicit insights suited to inform the co-design and effective implementation of policy measures.

Link to the registration from for the  Zoom meeting:

https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Yvf--hqz8sHNYo_uKwegmDgGf-1qb9…