Agriculture is a significant contributor to the global decline in biodiversity. Alternative approaches to intensive agriculture or efforts to change practice through legislation (e.g. Common Agriculture Policy, Sustainable use of Pesticides Directive) have, so far, had limited effect. Current mechanisms for compensating and encouraging farmers to apply biodiversity sensitive management strategies are often inefficient with low levels of adoption. They seldom support landscape scale approaches or account for regional needs or circumstances. Also, when adopted, monitoring is rarely carried out so there is little scope to evaluate the success of the strategies implemented. A fresh approach to the design, implementation, and monitoring of biodiversity sensitive farming is therefore urgently required.
The FRAMEwork project is a novel initiative, combining research, innovation, and exploratory implementation to promote a transition to biodiversity sensitive farming that will support biodiversity and benefit from the ecosystem services biodiversity provides, while guarding against any potential risks. To achieve this, the project seeks to design, implement, and evaluate the FRAMEwork System for Biodiversity Sensitive Farming. This acknowledges the foundational role of farmers in generating effective biodiversity management strategies by placing Farmer Clusters, local groups of farmers working as a collective to deliver landscape scale management, at its heart. A Cluster Facilitator, helps farmers work with other local actors to identify and progress towards shared sustainability goals, and to access specialist knowledge and resources to support biodiversity monitoring and management. Cluster farmers and facilitators are supported in building a community of practice through the open access online platform (Recodo) for sharing activities, information, data and resources between farmers, scientists, policy makers, and citizens. In this way, the FRAMEwork project seeks to introduce an ecologically sound, technically robust, and socio-economically desirable solution to biodiversity sensitive farming in Europe.
