Regional Mountain Conference

Practices that promote biodiversity in agriculture are often insufficiently rewarded due to the nature of biodiversity services as a public good and the lack of targeted support measures. Private business models based on the valorisation of biodiversity services could open up new income opportunities here. This is particularly true given that the EU Green Deal and its strategies, directives and regulations require companies to realign their sustainability efforts and that there is very high social demand for biodiversity services. The aim of this study is to identify the acceptance in mountain agriculture of the provision of biodiversity services and new business models, as well as the design elements of the latter.

To do so, a participatory, multi-stage approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods was applied in the LTSER Eisenwurzen platform as a study region. First, a quantitative farm survey (with 140 farmers) was conducted to assess the acceptance of and motives for biodiversity-promoting practices in mountain farming and new marketing concepts. In addition, the risks of different of such new concets were analysed in a workshop with 20 farmers. Furthermore, the measures were evaluated from a farm management perspective by calculating the opportunity and provision costs.

This article demonstrates that there is (still) acceptance for the implementation of measures to promote biodiversity. The results also show that the costs can only be partially offset by current government agri-environmental programmes and compensation payments, which jeopardises implementation in the long term. It is therefore necessary to establish ways of monetising these land use measures relatively quickly (e.g. regionally adapted and targeted public support measures) in order to preserve them. To counteract this in the long term, a large proportion of (young) farmers would be willing to join forces with companies to sell the biodiversity services they provide. The costs calculated here can be considered minimum prices. When designing these models, care must also be taken to ensure that the contracting parties are on an equal footing (no dependencies arise) and that the administrative burden for farmers is not increased. However, institutional, legal and formal frameworks must be created at both national and European level to enable payments by external partners from the business sector and to make these fair for all parties involved.