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Execution date:

End date:

The aim of the project is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to analyse real experiences on the application of conservation tools on private land (with the intention of promoting their replication at a wider level, whenever possible) and on the other hand, to propose concrete policies to support private conservation initiatives. In addition, a European network dedicated to the conservation of these private spaces will be created, which will be based on a long-term operating strategy and will have strong international allies.

As additional results, the evaluations of the conservation tools analysed in the framework of the project will be published and the guidelines and recommendations at the policy level for the strengthening of land stewardship in the EU will be drafted.

Preparatory actions (A)

A.1 Kick-off meeting for the launch of the project.

The project coordination committee (action C.1) will meet before the start of the project at the offices of the coordinating beneficiary in Berlin with the aim of formalising the partnership agreements and closing the necessary procedures, as well as the technical details, for the smooth implementation of the project (communication, reporting system, timetables, etc.). In the same way, it will serve to support the long-term operating structure as well as assign the roles and responsibilities of each of the partners within the project.  

A.2 Census of land stewardship initiatives in the EU.

This action aims to identify and classify: on the one hand, entities that have the conservation of private land as part of their mission and that apply these tools through advice to owners and, on the other hand, owners interested in the implementation of this type of strategy on their lands.

This action will build on activities and information already developed and will take information from two sources: the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy (which will host the secretariat of the project network) and the initial census carried out by the Scottish Trust for Nature (STN) in 2016.

This action will be carried out as a cabinet work, through internet searches and direct contact with the identified entities, thanks to the design of an online questionnaire that will allow automated data collection.

A.3 Analytical framework for the evaluation of pilot actions.

The objective of this action is to analyze and evaluate tools and experiences for the application of the conservation of private lands that are obtaining good results or that are promising to identify their replicability in the territory. To this end, information will be collected on these initiatives, through the design of a homogeneous and comparable framework, which will in turn be based on a system of information collection through a specific questionnaire.

The information will be collected by the project partners through the sending of the questionnaire, personal interviews, focus groups and contact with stakeholders in seminars and workshops (actions A.5 to A.13).

There is the possibility that, in these seminars, tools and techniques that had not been previously identified by the project implementation team will be presented. In this case, these experiences must be selected and analyzed, with the aim of making the action as complete as possible.

The results of this action will be included among the contents to develop actions B.1, B.3 and B.5.

A.4 Perspectives on cutting-edge international tools and models in land stewardship.

In 2017, the team will attend the Land Trust Alliance Rally (in Denver, Colorado), an annual meeting place for conservation and conservation entities of private territories from the United States, North America and even Latin America. In this event, more than 1,200 entities are represented and has more than 1,500-2,000 participants each year, making it an exceptional place to learn about new tools, techniques and initiatives on land stewardship and conservation of private lands that are not yet applicable in the EU.

After the meeting, the project attendees will have a few more days to organize additional meetings with territorial conservation entities, to learn about their scope of action, their mode of organization, initiatives, tools, etc.

In 2018, the project team will attend the Annual Conference of the International Network on Land Stewardship in Santiago, Chile, to exchange experiences on the results obtained in the pilot actions (A.5 to A.13) with entities of an international nature but with a regulatory and legal framework similar to that of the EU (e.g. Chile, which has a long history and experience in this field). This will establish a powerful framework for discussion on the possibilities for the implementation and replication of pilot experiences in the EU regulatory framework.

The intention of these meetings and exchanges is to enrich the knowledge of the application of land stewardship in the EU thanks to the knowledge and previous experience of countries with a long and successful history in this field, outside Europe.

A.5 Pilot action on company-owned spaces.

This action, which will take place in the county of Oberhavel in Brandburg (Germany) where the company “idealo.de” has acquired a 35ha property, will explore the process that must take place for a company to include the area within the corresponding national protection category (e.g. nature reserve) and to be able to manage it for conservation.

Through direct work with the company, as well as with the cooperation of public administrations, the project will be able to analyse how participatory a process of this type can be, when the initiative arises from a private owner. This will facilitate meetings with the parties involved, an ex ante inventory of the area, an assessment of the values that make this area to be conserved and advise the corresponding authorities during the process of designating the area. In the same way, the project will be able to delve into the recognitions that are granted to companies for this type of internship.

This action can be seen as a contribution of the project to the EU programme “Business and Biodiversity Initiative” and for this, a seminar will be organised with the B&B Initiative and other multiplier effect stakeholders, in which the action will be analysed and the results achieved will be presented.

A.6 Pilot action on conservation of private lands through crowdsourcing.

The objective of this action is twofold: on the one hand, to create management agreements for the conservation of private lands belonging to private individuals or public entities and, on the other hand, to help owners to maintain these agreements over time, making available to them a pool of resources (funds, volunteers, technical knowledge, etc.), which will be proposed to be supported by “crowdsourcing” actions aimed at the general public.

These contracts (which will have a management plan for the farms) will be signed between owners (public and/or private) and non-profit entities dedicated to conservation and will be developed in Portugal, where the abandonment of rural spaces has greatly increased the risk of fires and their spread in recent years. That is why the management plans included in the agreements will combine forest management techniques for vegetation but will have as their ultimate goal, the conservation of spaces and ecosystem services.

These plans will be presented at seminars aimed at private owners and stakeholders, with the intention of promoting and encouraging the signing of agreements.

A.7 Pilot action on commercial incentives for landowners to collaborate in land conservation initiatives.

The landscapes of high agricultural natural value in Eastern Europe are usually made up of mosaics of planting plots and small hay meadows. These ecosystems are home to enormous biodiversity but are currently threatened by a lack of economic viability. To contribute to their sustainability, the aim is to promote the products derived from these farms of high natural wealth, differentiating their products in the market through marketing actions (logo, branding, etc.) that guarantee the quality of the product through a seal. In order not to use systems that involve third parties (certifying entities), guarantee mark systems will be used.

This action will be carried out in the area of Tarnava Mare (Romania), with the aim of extending the brand to a landscape scale and that producers in the area can develop a powerful marketing campaign for their products that will economically encourage good management of farmers and ranchers in the area through the use of good biodiversity conservation practices on their farms.

The degree of success will be based on the increased dependence of farms on the sale of their products and not on the receipt of public aid. To this end, a work plan will be developed in which 3 farmers’ associations will collaborate and will include: a presentation session of the programme, a detailed mapping of the agricultural and natural values of the area involved and advice from the ELCN to study the degree of success of similar initiatives developed in the rest of the EU.

A.8 Pilot action on tax incentives for the signing of agreements.

This action consists of joining forces between the Biodiversity Foundation, the Land Stewardship Network and several departments of the government of Catalonia for the study and approval (in 2017), and subsequent implementation (in 2018) of a battery of tax incentives for land stewardship initiatives. In this context, work will be done on how land stewardship actions should be qualified to be possible recipients of tax incentives and what these incentives should be like: deductions on income taxes for owners, tax deductions for the transfer of land ownership (as long as the stewardship agreements remain active) and tax reductions for investments in property that are intended to promote the conservation actions that are applied on the farm.

Throughout the development of the action, it will be analyzed how these deductions are promoted among the owners, how their response is, what technical problems arise, etc.

The results obtained from this pilot action will be analysed and discussed in a joint workshop that will involve the non-governmental organisations involved, public administration, Ministries of Economy and Finance of the different Autonomous Communities of the Spanish State as well as other EU member states, etc. The results obtained will also be compared with the US incentive system to analyse the possibilities of implementation in the EU.

A.9 Pilot action based on integrated planning of territorial management.

For the correct implementation of the requirements associated with the Natura 2000 Network in Flanders in the Natuurpunt reserves, it is necessary to implement and update (in those areas that already have them) specific management plans that have the participation of local stakeholders, as well as private owners whose farms are adjacent to the entity’s network of private reserves.

To this end, an integrated management and planning system will be developed for the areas involved (including the lands of those owners, public and/or private, who want to be integrated into the action) that will be applied as a pilot action in the area of the project “Belgian LIFE Nature Integrated Project (LIFE2014 IPE BE002)”.

The development of the plan will be carried out in 5 phases:

1. Development of the methodology.
2. Inventory of owners and stakeholders interested in being part of the program.
3. Meetings with volunteers from the Natuurpunt reserves to increase their technical knowledge of the area and to convey to them the new initiatives of the integrated management plan.
4. Meetings with volunteers, owners and other stakeholders to work on the most important aspects and objectives of the Natura 2000 Network in each of the areas involved.
5. Include the results of the meetings in the integrated planning system.

Thanks to the development of this action, Natuurpunt contributes to the project with the creation of a participatory methodology for the management of private protected areas. Thanks to the existence of these plans, owners will be able to apply for financial aid from the Flemish authorities for the implementation of these plans on their estates. The owners will always be advised by Natuurpunt in the application of these plans, in addition to making available the work of volunteers and monitoring technicians to check their correct operation.

The action will end with a seminar in which the results obtained will be shown.

A.10 Pilot action on conservation easements on private lands.

Thanks to the LIFE project “NatNet”, a model was developed to ensure the permanent protection of the natural values of privately owned farms in South-West Lapland (Finland). Within the farms, key habitats were protected through agreements and registered as property easements (which does not modify the ownership of the farm) and as an additional advantage, the owners received tax incentives but were not compensated for the total natural value of their farm, which allowed them to continue to extract economic value from it and saved costs for the authorities.

In the context of this project, work will be done to apply the results obtained in the “NatNet” project in other areas (Sweden, Baltics, etc.) and other types of owners. The legal and financial frameworks of the new areas of work will be analysed and the factors that prevent, where necessary, their application in other areas will be identified.

The action will end with a seminar on the work carried out and the results obtained to discuss with stakeholders.

A.11 Pilot action to promote agricultural and livestock actions for conservation.  

The optimal cost/benefit results obtained in Western Ireland thanks to the LIFE Nature project “BurrenLIFE”, promote its replicability in the territory. The project focused on actions (removal of scrubland, repair of stone walls, restoration of habitats, etc.) and on the other hand on the performance of the farm (livestock, etc.) to promote its sustainable development.

The secret of the project was to give complete freedom to the owners (after discussing and treating this type of action with confidence) to implement the actions they wanted and carry them out when they wanted, integrating them into their day-to-day work. After 6 years of operation, it has demonstrated its success in the field, so surely, its adaptation to other areas and systems will offer accurate solutions to problems of management of private productive areas of high natural value and will generate a conservation network of private areas.

In the context of the project, this action (2017) will analyse the key challenges faced by landowners and their motivations for promoting conservation actions on their farms, as well as the adaptability of the Burrel model to farms and the promotion of appropriate incentives on them. In 2018, a seminar will be held for space managers in which the results obtained will be analyzed, which will be reported to the ELCN.

A.12 Pilot action on cultural heritage and conservation of private lands.

This action will study two particularities of the conservation of private land in Italy, which may be of interest for its application in other EU countries:

1. Italy is home to a huge number of private foundations that do not work in the field of nature protection but manage estates and spaces such as private reserves (FAI, Fondazione Zegna, Caetani etc.). The project will study how these entities work and whether their work system can be replicated elsewhere.
2. Other initiatives not only pursue the conservation of nature but also the conservation of cultural and ethnographic heritage, as well as ecotourism and artisanal products derived from these areas. The project will study how nature conservation and the other factors identified are reinforced and offer more benefits to private landowners than if they were promoted in isolation. It will then be studied whether it is possible to replicate it in other areas. The results will be shown at the European Year of Cultural Heritage that will take place in 2018.

To prepare for these actions, the action will start with a preliminary study of the country’s private conservation initiatives, techniques applied and obstacles to their dissemination.

The action will end with a seminar on nature conservation and cultural heritage protection that will take place in spring 2018 at Casale Giannella within the WWF Ortebello area.

A.13 Action on public recognition to promote the protection of private lands.

The pilot action will study how public recognition can be converted into an incentive to promote conservation actions on private land. To this end, the example of the “IMA Europe Biodiversity Award” will be applied and its effectiveness among owners, especially in the business field, will be analysed to promote actions of this type.

The action will focus on three aspects:

1. How to motivate the participation of IMA members.
2. How both participants and winners increase their conservation actions on their land.
3. How the publicity associated with the award encourages the participation of other companies that, until now, had not participated in the competition.

As a conclusion, the conservation measures put in place before and after participation in the competitions from 2016 to 2018 will be compared, how the companies have changed their view on conservation and how their reasons for participating in the competition have changed in that period.

The results will be presented and discussed in a final seminar with project stakeholders. In addition, some of the participants will be organisers of similar events elsewhere (Natura 2000 Awards, Quarry Life Award, New Zealand Farm Environment Trust’s Balance, Farm Environment Award etc.).

Communication and dissemination actions of the results of the Project (B)

B.1 Workshops on incentives for the conservation of private lands.

It is planned to hold 3 transversal workshops on the challenges faced by the conservation of private lands in the EU. These workshops are described in actions B.1, B.2 and B.3.

The first of these workshops is scheduled to take place in June 2018 and will deal with incentives for owners who carry out conservation activities on their farms. It will try to answer the question of why landowners carry out conservation actions on their lands and will deal with everything from ethical to economic values that, on many occasions, seem to be the promoters of these initiatives.

In the same way, the workshop will address the potential of public administrations to promote land conservation actions among private owners and will examine different tools that can be applied in this area: tax incentives, technical and/or structural incentives (e.g. brands and marketing actions), access to jobs by volunteers, legal incentives, etc. Practical examples of success in the application of incentives will be discussed, but cases of conflict will also be analysed.

B.2 Workshops on stakeholder cooperation for the conservation of private lands.

The second of the transversal seminars will deal with the concept of cooperation and will cover all the aspects that non-governmental organizations, owners, users, public administrations, etc., have to cover in order to work together and promote the conservation of private farms.

Some models of conservation of private lands place special emphasis on the strengthening of ties and the exchange of information between the different groups that participate in this current of work. Others, as is the case of the German model, work more in the field of closing institutionalized agreements. And others, work in groups to differentiate products from spaces of high natural value.  

The workshop will take place in October 2018 in Cluj, Romania and will explore both successful and less successful models of cooperation for the protection of private land. It is hoped that this exchange of experiences will help local groups in the creation of successful cooperative strategies.

B.3 Workshop on legal tools for the conservation of private lands.

The third of the workshops will take place in Rovaniemi (Finland) in June 2019 and will be dedicated to the legal tools that exist in the field and will be developed from a much more technical perspective.

The workshop will seek to delve into how the protection of private land is applicable within the framework of EU and individual member country legality and how new instruments can be developed and implemented in the future. There is a huge variability of legal figures in each country on private conservation and they must be analysed in depth by experts in the field to check their replicability and identify opportunities and obstacles that may be encountered.

B.4 Networking with other projects.

The joint work with other projects (LIFE and non-LIFE) of the same nature will create a harmonized network between the beneficiary and the coordinator of the project, with the institutions identified in action A.2 of the project.

This action will be carried out by attending activities and meetings organized by third parties, carrying out presentations of the project among important work networks, private owners, other stakeholders, etc. In the same way, the ‘LIFE and Land Stewardship’ report will be used to contact the main LIFE projects focused on the subject.

B.5 International Congress.

In October 2019, an international meeting on private land conservation will be held with a capacity of about 150 people in Antwerp, Belgium. This meeting will be organised jointly with the ILCN Annual Conference and will be the meeting point to communicate the results obtained within the framework of the project at the international level, both from the pilot actions (A.5-A.13) and the workshops (B.1-B.3). In this context, a draft manual on conservation (B.7) of private lands will be presented, as well as applicable policy recommendations (action B.8).

It will be a forum for the exchange and monitoring of the project’s actions which, enriched by additional experts from the EU and at international level, will help to consolidate and open new routes for the implementation of private land conservation strategies.

B.6 Communication of the project’s actions.

The project will apply different tools to communicate its results:

• Creation of a website that includes the objectives of the project, its actions, its products and results, etc. It will also have a tool that will promote the exchange of information and work between partners and members of the network.
• Opening of channels on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), to communicate the results that are produced within the scope of the project.
• Digital newsletter to inform partners about the progress of the project and its results.
• Notice boards (20 in total) at the locations where the pilot actions take place.
• Layman report with the final results obtained, intended for the general public.

B.7 Manual on the conservation of private lands.

The project will compile all the information and results obtained in the actions developed into a manual on private land conservation in the EU that will include not only the tools applied by the different members, but also guidelines to help landowners and organizations to improve their work in this area.

The manual will be participatory and, in its development, all the project partners will participate, as well as external experts, who will also ensure the correction of possible errors, etc. The manual will be created within the framework developed in action B.3.

B.8 Recommendations at the policy level to increase the conservation of private lands.

In this action, the information obtained in the pilot actions, workshops and international conference on the political implications of the conservation of private lands will be compiled. It will focus on the necessary changes (at the legal and administrative level) that must be covered by the policies of the EU and the member countries, as well as on the preventive measures that must be developed to avoid possible abuses from the private conservation tools developed.

The draft of the document will be presented at the International Congress to which representatives of the member states will be invited, as well as associations at the European level such as COPA, ELO, EEB, EHF, the European Commission (DGs ENV, AGRI, TAXUD) and the European Parliament.

Management actions and monitoring of the progress of the project (C)

C.1 Project Management.

• Governance Committee: will meet every 6 months at the following events: kick-off meeting (action A.1 – first quarter 2017), LTA Rally (action A.4 – third quarter 2017), ILCN Annual Conference (action A.4 – first quarter 2018), incentive workshop (action B.1 – second quarter 2018), cooperation workshop (action B.2 – fourth quarter 2018), legal tools workshop (action B.3 first quarter 2019), international conference (action B.5 – third quarter 2019). Additionally, they must have a monthly meeting through videoconference. In all these meetings, the coordinator will report to the rest of the participants the status of execution of each of the actions, possible delays and the monitoring indicators of action C.2 will be analyzed.
• Advisory Board: made up of representatives of the project’s stakeholders , it will meet twice throughout the project (at the incentive workshop and at the international conference). He will be in charge of advising and guiding in the actions of the project through his strategic opinions.

C.2 Compilation of project monitoring indicators.

At the beginning of the project, the project team will make a list of indicators to monitor compliance with the project’s actions, as well as their impact. To this end, the list of indicators offered by the Commission will be taken as a basis.

C.3 Project monitoring.

Thanks to the indicators defined in action C.2, it will be possible to carry out a periodic analysis of the fulfilment of the project’s actions as well as their impact. The results will be analyzed in the meetings of the project’s governance committee with the aim of proposing strategies and solutions to deviations, possible delays, etc.

C.4 Socio-economic monitoring.

At the end of the project, the socio-economic impact of the project will be assessed through the evaluations carried out in action C.3. To this end, it will try to estimate the direct and indirect effects that the execution of the project has generated in terms of job creation, stimulation of commercial activities, investments, etc.

C.5 After-LIFE Plan.

Once the project is completed, the European Private Land Conservation Network (ELCN) created within the framework of the project will continue to be continued. To this end, an office will be created that will act as a technical secretariat in the Eurosite offices, which will be responsible for perpetuating the activities of the network among its members. The costs generated by the office will be supported by the membership fees as well as by the project funds.  The Plan will describe the functions that the secretarial office will cover, the costs that it will generate and how these will be covered.  In the same way, it will seek to maintain the pilot actions in each of the countries in which they have been carried out with the aim of supporting them and perpetuating them over time.