Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T16:41:49.123Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An analysis of the European Union’s conservation funding allocation by habitat and country

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2020

Christos Mammides Open the ORCID record for Christos Mammides [Opens in a new window]  and
George Kirkos
Christos Mammides*
Affiliation:
Guangxi Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Conservation, College of Forestry, Guangxi University, Daxuedonglu 100, Nanning, 530004, China
George Kirkos
Affiliation:
Cyprus Institute, 20 Konstantinou Kavafi Street, Nicosia, 2121, Cyprus
*
Author for correspondence: Prof Christos Mammides, Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Many of Europe’s unique habitats are highly threatened. In order to tackle these threats, the European Union (EU) is annually financing, mainly through its LIFE programme, conservation actions aimed at improving the conservation status of its habitats. We analysed the allocation of the programme’s budget since its inception in 1992 and we found that the number of projects implemented within the EU member states is only weakly related to the number of habitats within them (R2 = 0.39). In some states, fewer than 25% of the habitats have been funded, while in others, more than 75% of the habitats have been funded. There are also disparities in terms of which habitats are being funded; a quarter of them have never received any funding, while others have been targeted by multiple projects. Transnational cooperation between the states is low, further perpetuating the aforementioned disparities. Projects are implemented almost exclusively within the recipient state, often irrespectively of the conservation status of the targeted habitats in other states. We recommend that the EU addresses these disparities by encouraging projects in underfunded states, especially in habitats with unfavourable conservation statuses. Moreover, the EU should encourage transnational cooperation in order to promote effective conservation across the EU and to help underfunded states build their capacity.

Keywords

biogeographical regionsconservation policyEuropeHabitats DirectiveLIFE programmeNatura 2000 sites
Type
Research Paper
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 123 - 129
Copyright
© Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Council of the European Commission (1992) Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora. Official Journal of the European Communities. Series L 206: 7–49.Google Scholar
Ellwanger, G, Runge, S, Wagner, M, Ackermann, W, Neukirchen, M, Frederking, W, Müller, Cet al. (2018) Current status of habitat monitoring in the European Union according to Article 17 of the Habitats Directive, with an emphasis on habitat structure and functions and on Germany. Nature Conservation 29: 57.10.3897/natureconservation.29.27273CrossRefGoogle Scholar
European Commission (2017) MID-TERM EVALUATION. Accompanying the Document Report on the Mid-Term Evaluation of the Programme for Environment and Climate Action (LIFE). Brussels, Belgium: Publications Office of the European Union [www document]. URL https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52017SC0355.Google Scholar
European Commission (2018) LIFE Programme [www document]. URL http://ec.europa.eu/environment/life/project/Projects/index.cfm.Google Scholar
European Environment Agency (2018) Article 17 dataset [www document]. URL https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/article-17-database-habitats-directive-92-43-eec-1.Google Scholar
Evans, D (2006) The habitats of the European Union habitats directive. Biology and Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 106B(3): 167–173.Google Scholar
Grömping, U (2006) Relative importance for linear regression in R: the package relaimpo. Journal of Statistical Software 17: 139–147.10.18637/jss.v017.i01CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hermoso, V, Morán-Ordóñez, A and Brotons, L (2018a) Assessing the role of Natura 2000 at maintaining dynamic landscapes in Europe over the last two decades: implications for conservation. Landscape Ecology 33: 1447–1460.10.1007/s10980-018-0683-3CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hermoso, V, Villero, D, Clavero, M and Brotons, L (2018b) Spatial prioritisation of EU’s LIFE-Nature programme to strengthen the conservation impact of Natura 2000. Journal of Applied Ecology 55: 1575–1582.10.1111/1365-2664.13116CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kark, S, Levin, N, Grantham, HS and Possingham, HP (2009) Between-country collaboration and consideration of costs increase conservation planning efficiency in the Mediterranean Basin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106: 15368–15373.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kark, S, Tulloch, A, Gordon, A, Mazor, T, Bunnefeld, N and Levin, N (2015) Cross-boundary collaboration: key to the conservation puzzle. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 12: 12–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kukkala, AS, Arponen, A, Maiorano, L, Moilanen, A, Thuiller, W, Toivonen, T, Zupan, Let al. (2016) Matches and mismatches between national and EU-wide priorities: examining the Natura 2000 network in vertebrate species conservation. Biological Conservation 198: 193–201.10.1016/j.biocon.2016.04.016CrossRefGoogle Scholar
López-Hoffman, L, Varady, RG, Flessa, KW and Balvanera, P (2010) Ecosystem services across borders: a framework for transboundary conservation policy. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 8: 84–91.10.1890/070216CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lung, T, Meller, L, van Teeffelen, AJA, Thuiller, W and Cabeza, M (2014) Biodiversity funds and conservation needs in the EU under climate change. Conservation Letters 7: 390–400.10.1111/conl.12096CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mammides, C (2019) European Union’s conservation efforts are taxonomically biased. Biodiversity and Conservation 28: 1291–1296.10.1007/s10531-019-01725-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazor, T, Possingham, HP and Kark, S (2013) Collaboration among countries in marine conservation can achieve substantial efficiencies. Diversity and Distributions 19: 1380–1393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team (2018) A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Sánchez-Fernández, D, Abellán, P, Aragón, P, Varela, S and Cabeza, M (2018) Matches and mismatches between conservation investments and biodiversity values in the European Union. Conservation Biology 32: 109–115.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tscharntke, T, Tylianakis, JM, Rand, TA, Didham, RK, Fahrig, L, Batary, P, Bengtsson, Jet al. (2012) Landscape moderation of biodiversity patterns and processes‐eight hypotheses. Biological Reviews 87: 661–685.10.1111/j.1469-185X.2011.00216.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verburg, PH, van Berkel, DB, van Doorn, AM, van Eupen, M and van den Heiligenberg, HARM (2010) Trajectories of land use change in Europe: a model-based exploration of rural futures. Landscape Ecology 25: 217–232.10.1007/s10980-009-9347-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wickham, H (2016) rvest: Easily Harvest (Scrape) Web Pages. R package version 0.3.2 [www document]. URL https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rvest.Google Scholar