Farmer lost out by minutes in race for wildlife funding

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1. 1

   Farmer lost out by minutes in race for wildlife funding

   BBC NewsPublished Oct 21, 2026Checked Oct 21, 2026

   “Richard Peace wanted funding for work aimed at encouraging the barn owls already thriving on his farm The barn owls have become one of Richard Peace's favourite sights on the farm. As dusk falls near the woods edging his land outside Nuneaton in Warwickshire, the birds emerge to hunt over fields he has spent years managing. This year he wanted to do more to help them thrive. To encourage the owls, Richard planned to leave some crops unharvested near the woodland where they live. "Obviously that will bring some of the wildlife out of the woods, like voles and mice, and I was hoping that the barn owls would then thrive even more than they are already," he said. But leaving part of a crop in the ground comes at a cost. The government offers support to farmers carrying out environmental work through schemes that pay for so-called public goods, from improving habitats to boosting biodiversity. Richard said technical difficulties and the speed at which applications were processed left him missing out on funding For Richard, accessing some of that £310m funding seemed straightforward enough. All he had to do was submit an application. What he did not realise was that he was entering a race against thousands of other farmers for that limited pot of cash. "We looked at 8am and it wasn't live. I had things to do so I went to work on the farm," he said. "Checked again at lunchtime, it was live and I started. We had a few errors but I did get to the end of the form and submitted it.”

2. 2

   The Australian experience in using tenders for conservation

   Land Use Policy (Rolfe et al.)Published Apr 1, 2017Checked Oct 21, 2026

   “The number of separate conservation tenders that have been performed, and the variations in environmental targets, state jurisdictions, case study circumstances, design and implementation, provides a rich data base of projects for analysis – unique at the international level. The review section of the paper covers three broad areas. The first aim is to provide an overview of the various tenders and their history and design in different settings. The second is to review their application, particularly in relation to auction design, metric design and contract design aspects, while the third is to identify the extent to which tenders provided more cost-effective outcomes than alternatives such a fixed rate grants. An additional goal is to explain why, after so many trials, conservation tenders are not more widely used in Australia. Key conclusions are that the multiple trials show that tenders are robust, relatively simple to apply and deliver more cost-effective allocations of public funding than other grant mechanisms. The reasons for their limited use can be related more to political and bureaucratic forces and inertia rather than to economic and design limitations.”

3. 3

   Willing or complying? The delicate interplay between voluntary and mandatory interventions to promote farmers' environmental behavior

   Food Policy (Barreiro‐Hurlé et al.)Published Jul 6, 2023Checked Oct 21, 2026

   “Agri-environmental policies generally build around two complementary approaches: mandatory requirements and (compensated) voluntary measures. One of the challenges of the future EU Common Agricultural Policy is precisely to find the right balance between these two types of interventions. We conducted an experiment with farmers in three EU Member States to assess the impact of (1) increasing mandatory contributions to the environment, and of (2) decreasing unconditional income support. We also assess the effect of two key behavioural factors: environmental concern and trait reactance. Results show that both interventions reduce voluntary contributions to the environment, but the reduction is higher when mandatory contributions increase than when income decreases.. However, when mandatory contribution increases substantially, this more than offsets the reduction of voluntary contributions, leading to higher total contributions.”

4. 4

   Rearticulating the myth of human–wildlife conflict

   Conservation Letters (Peterson et al.)Published Feb 2, 2010Checked Oct 21, 2026

   “We used content analysis of wildlife conservation publications and professional meeting presentations to explore the use of the phrase, human–wildlife conflict, and compared competing models explaining its usage. Of the 422 publications and presentations using human–wildlife conflict, only 1 reflected a traditional definition of conflict, >95% referred to reports of animal damage to entities human care about, and <4% referred to human–human conflict. Usage of human–wildlife conflict was related to species type (herbivores with human food, carnivores with human safety, meso‐mammals with property), development level of the nation where the study occurred (less developed nations with human food and more developed nations with human safety and property damage), and whether the study occurred on private lands or protected areas (protected areas with human–human conflict and other areas with property damage). We argue that the phrase, human–wildlife conflict, is detrimental to coexistence between humans and wildlife, and suggest comic reframing to facilitate a more productive interpretation of human–wildlife relationships.”