sustainable use of biological diversity.pdf - India Environment Portal

Surveying the coverage and remains of the cultural landscapes of Europe while envisioning their conservation
3.7 Permanent European Conference for the Study
of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL)
In the same vein, the network PECSRL was established
in 1957 at an inaugural conference held in
Nancy, France, as an international group of landscape
researchers convened to discuss the unifying
concept of the past, present and future of European
landscapes. The international PECSRL conference,
organized every two years, serves as a serial meeting
point to improve interdisciplinary cooperation
among researchers and practitioners in the fields of
landscape research, policy and management.
4. The impact of the european union policies on
landscapes
National and European Union sectoral policies
alike, as recognized by the European Spatial Development
Perspective, together with global market
processes, i.e. commodity or fuel prices and commodity
stock fluctuations, are having an impact
on rural landscapes and generate short- mid- and
long-term land use changes and their spatial configuration.
Therefore it is not exclusive to agricultural
policy, as programmes oriented to industry,
infrastructures, or the environment are also having
an impact on the structure of the economic activity
and on the directions of change. Although its effect
may be more limited, because landscapes do not
hold comparably rich natural values, some examples
of influential environmental regulation include:
• Directive 79/409/EEC of 2 April 1979 on the
conservation of wild birds, which mandates that
member states must conserve, maintain or restore
the biotopes and habitats of birds,
• Nitrates Directive (91/676/EEC), concerning the
protection of waters against pollution caused by
nitrates, has the objective of reducing water pollution
caused by nitrates from agricultural sources,
induced by intensification,
• Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on
the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna
and flora, which mandates that member states
must designate special areas of conservation and
special protection areas, or the
• Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament
and of the Council establishing a framework
for Community action in the field of water policy
(Water Framework Directive), which seeks to
achieve a good status of all waters and their management
based on river basins.
Half of European Union land is farmed and thus,
in practice, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)
has been indirectly acting as a landscape policy. CAP,
initially formulated to increase agricultural productivity
and reach both food security and a standard
of living to European Union farmers, was based on
an integrated system of measures which sought to
maintain commodity prices and has been providing
production subsidies.
Without such a primal goal, it has made substantial
progress in its environmental dimension at the
Helsinki European Council (December 1999) first,
recognizing the multifunctional character of agriculture,
and then at the Göteborg European Council
(June 2001), when the European Union Sustainable
Development Strategy was adopted. The two environmental
pillars of CAP are cross compliance and
agri-environment measures, and national agri-environmental
schemes. The cross compliance mechanism
links direct payments to compliance with basic
environmental standards and the maintenance of
land in good environmental conditions by farmers.
It is compulsory and establishes a reference level
for agri-environment measures. Its strength comes
from the capability to encourage farmers to protect
and enhance the environment on their farmland by
adopting environmentally-friendly farming techniques,
for which they are compensated for the derived
additional costs and income loss. Among the
measures, those with a likely impact on landscape
include:
• extensification and low-intensity pasture systems,
• diversification,
• integrated farm management and organic agriculture,
• preservation of landscape and their historical features,
and
• conservation of high-value habitats and their associated
biodiversity.
In a close realm, the Council of Ministers of the
European Union responsible for spatial planning
agreed upon the European Spatial Development Perspective
(ESDP) in Potsdam in 1999. The main goal
of ESDP was to set up the foundations of a European
Union common policy in spatial planning in order
to reach a geographically-balanced development,
mitigating spatial disparities based on land use and
infrastructure planning. It recognizes the important
role of agriculture as a factor of landscape transformation
and uniformization and it identifies the new
functions of rural areas and the increasing pressure
of mass tourism over ecosystems and landscapes.
The strategies envisaged by ESDP include:
• the coordination of development measures, particularly
in transboundary European Union regions,
underscoring the importance of the INTER-
REG Initiative,
• the partnership between towns and their country-
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