Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to change his or her management methods in accordance with certain
regulations specii ed under a 'management agreement'. Such management
agreements usually involve an identii cation of, for example, the farming
practices necessary to achieve environmental objectives and then stipu-
late how they should be put into practice. In order to specify guidelines
for 'good environmental practice', policy-makers need to understand the
relationship between management practices and the species, population
or community concerned; for example, the specii c relationships between
farm management methods and the species composition of grasslands.
An example of this includes the use of stocking restrictions to encour-
age heather moorland in the United Kingdom. The model developed by
Simpson et al.
(1998) crucially relates heather productivity and survival
to varying intensities of the management variable (in this case, the stock-
ing rate). Reductions in stocking rate can then be used to target farmers
who are able to manage heather sustainably under, say, a management
agreement.
Typically, agri-environment policy under a management agreement
involves reductions in farm intensity in exchange for compensatory pay-
ments. In order to do this a precise estimate of the changes in management
intensity to meet environmental objectives is required. This then enables
the specii c costs to the producer to be calculated based on opportunity
cost pricing procedures. In the example described above, Simpson et al.
(1998) suggest that in order to meet conservation guidelines for heather
conservation ewe stocking rates will have to be reduced to between 13 and
91 per cent on Orkney and between 5 and 89 per cent on Shetland. They
report that such a reduction would in most cases result in major i nan-
cial losses to farmers who would need to be compensated if they were to
comply with their recommendations.
This process of European agricultural reform has inl uenced the objec-
tives of the CAP, which have undergone signii cant changes in recent
years. The aims of the CAP are now strongly oriented towards environ-
mental conservation rather than agricultural productivity. The devel-
opment of these initiatives has provoked many EU countries to adopt
environmental policies specii cally aimed at encouraging producers to
adopt less intensive agronomic and silvicultural practices (Hanley, 1995).
The status of environmental objectives therefore is increasingly recognized
to be as important as other goals such as rural income stability, employ-
ment and support for agricultural commodities. As a consequence, the
monitoring and evaluation of environmental policy includes an increas-
ing environmental component. The appraisal of agri-environment policy
needs to include an assessment of physical economic targets but also needs
to meet environmental objectives.
