A systematic approach for assessing spatially and temporally differentiated opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation measures in grasslands
2015
Mewes, Melanie | Drechsler, Martin | Johst, Karin | Sturm, Astrid | Wätzold, Frank
Biodiversity loss in Europe is caused to a large extent by agricultural intensification. To halt this loss, agri-environment schemes have been introduced to compensate farmers for (costly) biodiversity conservation measures. Current agri-environment schemes often consider only a few conservation measures which is insufficient to conserve all endangered biodiversity in an agricultural region. This problem is particularly pertinent in grasslands where many different mowing and grazing dates are required to protect the variety of species breeding in the grassland at different times. A key requirement to design agri-environment schemes for grassland conservation is therefore to offer specific compensation for more measures based on a systematic approach that calculates farmers' opportunity costs in relation to the timing of grassland use which is still lacking. This will at best attract more farmers and offer compensation calculated in line with EU requirements for co-financed measures through the Rural Development Programme. We fill this gap by developing a systematic approach to assess the costs of different mowing and grazing dates. Our approach is general enough to be applicable on a large spatial scale but can still sensitively differentiate among different timings. Moreover it is straightforward and time-saving enough to be suitable for implementation in regional scale optimisation procedures. We demonstrate this by applying the systematic cost assessment in the decision support software DSS-Ecopay using the example of grassland biodiversity conservation measures in the German federal state of Saxony.
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