It was a great pleasure and honour that I could work on this very interesting and important topic. The European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) established a working group, consisting scientists nominated by 15 European Academies to provide a synthesis and critical evaluation of the concept of regenerative agriculture in the face of European agri-environmental policies. The project director was Prof. Thomas Elmqvist, and the working group was co-chaired by Prof. Lars Walloe and myself. We worked with a very diverse and dedicated international team in the past one year to accomplish this challenging but highly interesting task. Even though we worked fully online, we very often met in the virtual space and had very interesting and fruitful discussions.
The report tackles one of the most important issues of the modern societies: how to make agriculture regenerative, how to maintain its productivity, but decrease its negative environmental impacts. We went even further and evaluated how we can not only mitigate the negative effects but also increase the positive impacts of agriculture on biodiversity? We reviewed a large body of scientific literature, with a special emphasis on reviews and meta-analyses, and evaluated the effects of different environment-friendly agricultural practices on biodiversity, carbon capture and storage and agricultural yield. We gave a lot of evidence-based recommendations for environmental policy and hope that the report can initiate further discussions and can facilitate policy implementations that can support positive changes.
It is a very important and complex topic, so below I summarize only some of the most important messages - from my personal perspective.
- Transformative changes in the way we think about and how we organize the food systems would be necessary to make agriculture truly regenerative. Almost one third of the agricultural products are wasted today - this is a serious amount of food waste! And despite this enormous waste we still establish new agricultural lands, and still intensify the farming systems in many regions, which have serious detrimental effects on biodiversity. Shortening the production and consumption chains and reducing the amount of food waste would be crucial steps.
- There is a huge number of environment-friendly diversification practices that increase the biodiversity of non-farmed organisms, improve the functioning of agro-ecosystems without a considerable decrease of yield (actually, some of these practices can even increase the yield!). These practices include no tillage or reduced tillage, cover cropping, intercropping or agroforestry. These practices increase the permanence of vegetation cover in the fields which have a huge potential for carbon capture and storage in the soil. Actually, the results of the brand new IPCC report point to exactly the same direction, which is great. It would be important to increase the available funding for these best practices in the CAP.
- Our report paid special attention to highlight the complexity of red meat consumption. Industrially bred cattle contribute to huge emissions of greenhouse gases and producing their forage - in large arable lands, with a lot of external inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, traded between large distances - has serious negative environmental impacts. But grass-fed cattle, especially those that are extensively kept in pastures have several positive environmental impacts. They can maintain an outstandingly high biodiversity in many of Europe's semi-natural grasslands. By maintaining permanent grasslands, they contribute considerably to carbon capture and storage, as grassland plants store large carbon stocks in their root systems for a long time. Also, extensively kept, grass-fed cattle provide high-quality, nutritious dairy and meat products. Therefore in the report we paid special attention to show the nuances related to red meat and animal husbandry in the agricultural landscape and recommended the increasing support of extensive grazing systems in the CAP.
- We emphasised that the positive effects of environmental friendly farming practices can be multiplied if they are not only applied at the farm scale but also at multiple farms within the landscape. There is a vast literature in landscape ecology showing that landscape composition moderates ecological processes in larger scales. For example, if mutliple farmers establish high-diversity landscape features (HDLFs), such as flower strips or set-aside areas in a landscape and these patches can 'communicate', then the positive effects on the pollination as ecosystem service can spill over to the whole landscape. The EU Biodiversity Strategy aims to have at least 10% of the agriculturally utilized area under HDLFs (currently, it is approximately 5%), which is a huge opportunity for creating multifunctional agricultural landscapes. If we plan the new HDLFs to fit in the existing system of the green infrastructure based on the theoretical advances in landscape ecology, the positive effects could be multiplied. For enabling this, support schemes available not only for individual farmers but also for groups of farmers, for supporting coordinated actions should be established and be made widely available in the EU member states.
- We also highlighted, that the European agriculture is a very complex and diverse system. Each country, each biogeographical region, and each farm has its own peculiarities and character. This uniqueness of course cannot be fully considered in EU-wide schemes. However, as a principle, it would be important to support those agricultural practices that are suited for a given region, which fit to the regional environmental and socio-economic characteristics and do not sacrifice the non-provisioning (i.e. regulating, supporting and cultural) ecosystem services. For example, the EU's ambition to plant 2 billion trees is a great opportunity, but it is very important not to plant these trees in the water-limited regions.
We hope that the report will help in making positive changes. There are of course a lot more topics discussed in the document, so it is worth to read the text, or the summary of the report.
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