Budget and economic considerations

Often, the costs involved would be related to carrying out periodic monitoring surveys,
networking connected with CWR knowledge sharing, and actively promoting genetic resource use

If the population is stable and healthy, the costs will be low. However, if it is proved that the existing management regime is not appropriate for the conservation of the CWR population, more active conservation must be carried out.

The abandonment of the traditional practices or areas of de-population causes succession, which usually leads to decrease in CWR diversity. Such practices in many cases can be subsidized within existing funds such as agri-environmental schemes of habitat restoration projects (e.g., within the LIFE programme or other EU funds).

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What happens if it is not enough?

However, the existing level of payments may not be sufficient, especially in the case of remote locations and the need of manual intervention. In such cases, it is especially important to support landowners in the search of additional funds and preparation of targeted projects with better funding level, adjusted to local conditions. The farmer / landowner is recommended to seek assistance from local farmer or landowner associations, government extension agencies, regional authorities, or national parks and conservation agencies as to what support may be available to them to support CWR population maintenance. In the case of agricultural production, these can be realized by general support to low-input, agro-ecological and organic farming approaches.

Collective payments

Any kind of collective payments may play a crucial role, such as collective approaches to agri-environmental schemes. For this purpose, there are two broad categories of contracts:

  1. Contracts signed with a group of farmers and involving a collective payment and the entire community acts as required to provide the public goods benefit, so called community-based contracts.
  2. Individual contracts with a payment condition linked to the behaviour or environmental results of a pre-defined group, in the CWR context payment made for maintaining specific CWR taxa / populations in particular locations, so called conditional collective contracts where compliance is easily assessed and only evidence of compliance triggers payment.