Dear Participants,
 
Please find attached a summary note related to our conference "LIFE Nature and Biodiversity - Preparing the Future" which took place on 31/05 and 01/06/2010.
 
Best Regards,
For the LIFE Nature Secretariat

The winners of the ‘Best LIFE Nature & Biodiversity Projects’ and the “Best LIFE Environment Projects” received their awards at two special awards ceremonies, held in Brussels to coincide with Green Week 2010.

Two short videos of the ceremonies are now online:

    * Video of the LIFE Nature and Biodiversity awards ceremony:
http://lifevideos.eu/videos/best_nat_2010.html

    * Video of the LIFE Environment and Eco-innovation awards ceremony:
http://lifevideos.eu/videos/best_env_2010.html

Thanks Tasos. A very good initiative and an interesting idea. Without wishing to get into the details of your proposal I think you have opened a new channel that others could wish to follow. I would be glad if others would post similar proposals. This may be very helpful for us when we will sit down and start drafting the next regulation.
By the way, a big thank you to all those who attended the meeting and all those who could not and follow us via this forum. It was really a great event showing how committed we all are!
Angelo Salsi

After the very interesting discussion held during the conference, and using my experience as an employee (since 1997), and coordinator (in HOS - Birdlife Greece, since 2003) of Life projects in Greece (we have submitted more than 15 proposals so far, as an NGO or as local stakeholders), and having a rather good assessment of the situation concerning the funding and management of Biodiversity and Natura related issues in Greece but also in Cyprus, Bulgaria and more, I will make the following proposal for an objective funding mechanism, directly linked with the EU biodiversity.

We all know, that not all EU countries have the same level of intitutional, administrational and organisational capacity, political will, funds and human resources devoted to the protection of nature and biodiversity. In fact, for many countries, not necessarily only the new MS, Life funding is the only reliable mechanism for this topic. The strong point of Life, for these countries is that proposal selection, funding and monitoring of implementation comes directly from Brussels and thus, it can overpass a number of weaknesses in the national systems. The weak point of this approach is that it lacks a strategic vision per country and that most of the funded projects, need a lot of co-financing which is very difficult to be safeguarded, due to the lack of national mechanisms and will. But even with this weaknesses, Life is better than nothing and certainly far better than funds coming through structural funds or any other of EU funding that is being allocated through national authorities.

On the other hand, we have a great number of EU countries, mainly old member states and northern european countries, where the level of national authorities organisation, the capacity and stakeholder involvement and the national funding opportunities are high, compared to the previously described situation. Countries which can very much proliferate from a number of funding opportunities (such as the Rural Development Regulation, or the Interreg programme) to appropriately plan and fund their biodiversity and protected areas systems, without needing the persistent acute eye of the European Commission to safeguard the proper implementation of the relevant projects.

European biodiversity conservation is a topic which demands for coordinated action from all countries and not just from the most developed and capable ones. In fact, usually most biodiversity is linked with the less developed MS. The share of each country in the responsibility for biodiversity conservation can be assessed objectively, through a set of scientific criteria and in relation to the surface area of the Natura network. The level of each country's organisational capacity to plan, and efficiently implement biodiversity conservation measures and Natura 2000 site management, can also be objectively assessed through a set of criteria which could be developed for this reason.

My proposal would be that funds for each member state should be relevant to each country's share in the EU biodiversity resources and allocated for each programmatic period (e.g 5-10 years) as a total amount per annum. The shares of a) the Commission handled Life funding and b) for the nationally handled other relevant EU funds, should be decided according to the assessment of the country capacity to plan and implement the identified priorities for action. In this manner, EU countries could be divided in 2-3 categories, where the most capable ones will be able to plan and implement directly their programmes (more weight in case b), while the less capable ones will have more help and intervention from the Commission (more weight in case a). The total sums of money will be the same but the efficiency of the system would be greatly enhanced. At the same time, the work load on behalf of the Life Unit would probably decrease and the competition for funds among stakeholders from the capable countries and those from the less capable, will become much more fair.

Although a bit complicated to be planned at the initial stage, I believe that this system would provide a real EU added value for the Natura 2000 network, and our biodiversity and at the same time will help us all to train our administration to improve their capacity so that to change the category of the funding mixture after some years.
     

To facilitate the decision about adopting a more programmatic approach, the project based approach, used so far, should somehow be evaluated. Missing the goal of halting biodiversity loss though, allows the presumption that our approaches to the problem are not efficient enough. An overall breakthrough is needed, since if we go on in the same way we will keep achieving similar results.
As József Fidlóczky mentioned above, there is some sort of prioritisation already. To my opinion, at least this should be substantially expanded, by prioritising the actual threatened species/habitats, which are currently either not included at all or not included correctly (as far as their conservation status is concerned) in the Annexes of the Habitats Directive and upgrading accordingly the co-financing rate for projects aiming at their conservation to a minimum of 75%.
An effective step towards this direction could be taken for species, since the EU is compiling an updated European Red List (a necessity, which is great to be fulfilled) in cooperation with IUCN. As a biologist-ichthyologist I will try to set an example here, mentioning that (according to IUCN) there are in Europe 147 Critically Endangered or Endangered vertebrate species, out of which 111 are freshwater fish (correspondingly to freshwater systems like intermittent streams, eutrophic lakes, etc., which are included among the most threatened ecosystems worldwide). At the moment, only eight freshwater fish are listed in Annex II as priority species. If projects that aim at the conservation of any of the 111 CE or E freshwater fish species could be prioritised and co-financed by the EU with a minimum of 75%, it is certain that many more concrete project proposals would emerge, more relevant projects would be implemented and our contribution to halting biodiversity loss would be enhanced.

I agree with Maria Stoumbouli.

I find fair the INA from the focus of distribute back equally the resources for nature conservation among the EU member. But, in fact, biodiversity is not homogeneous spread through Member States, if we want to preserve EU biodiversity as a whole and achieve the next halt of biodiversity lost in EU we should find a way to take this in account. One interesting first view on this could be to evaluate the bioclimatic regions contribution to EU biodiversity regarding its surface. Independently of the way to link more biodiverse areas with more budget resources, the question is: will this relevantly increase our chances to halt EU biodiversity lost?

Regarding the last parragraph of Maria post, there is also a undesireable consequence of the INA system that is "helping" the countries with less proposals: unequal level of competence. Being the competence at national level, those countries with less proposals (p. e. few conservation organizations, few resources, less administration support, etc.) will have a greater chance to have their proposal cofinanced (if correctly developed). In other countries with higher competence many good proposal could be "out" of the budget, beeing (potentially) even a greater contribution to EU biodiversity conservation than some of other countries. Is this limitating the effect of resources intended for EU biodiversity conservation?

Integration into other programmes has not, in my view, been very successful to date.  Whilst I agree that theoretically this is the correct way to finance the natural environment, in reality the environment is the poor relation in the sustainable development triangle.  You can get projects funded that have a primary economic focus, you can get projects funded that have a primary social focus, but it is very hard- if not impossible to get a project funded if it has a primary nature or biodiversity purpose. 

Therefore a specific fund for nature and biodiversity continues to be required and in my view should be enlarged in future to take account of the lack of true integration that should have happened across the other programmes.

A change in the period for the development of the proposals will be very convenient. The current period (May-June to September) has the summer holidays in the middle. At least in Spain this is a BIG problem when looking for administration support (support letters, co-financing, etc.) or if waiting for other administration procedures needed for the proposal development (p. e. capture permits). If not so severe this problem also happens with other organizations.
In the practice this means no advance in the procedures during August and very low advance during July.

Due to this reason we have lost 250.000 € of co-financing and one partner (Italy) during the correction of a failed 2008 proposal (final negative aswer from the Commission the 31 July) for the 2009 call for proposals (deadline the 15th september).

The new tentative period proposed February - June is just perfect.

Sergio Couto

We are an NGO. Our experience with LIFE Programme in the South of Italy is that LIFE projects are a unique opportunity to start a real management of Natura 2000 sites. In fact the awareness of public administrations about the necessity of this management is very poor and a LIFE project can actually increase the responsibility of local public bodies on the conservation issues.
On the other hand, public administrations are often not prepared in the management of LIFE projects and this could be cause of delays. We think that, in our country, a more intensive involvement of NGOs in LIFE projects could be useful to guarantee the long term effectiveness of the actions. This could be done with some adjustments in the financial rules of the programme (i.e. covering the amount of own co-funding with "in nature" goods or with the work of volunteers or rising the percentage of EU funding for project in cooperation with NGOs, etc.).
Matteo Orsino
Centro Studi Naturalistici Onlus

We are working on the anticipation of the call. The plan is to have the next call in February 2011 with submission in June 2011 and signature of the corresponding grant agreements early spring 2012. In this way we would shorten the evaluation process down to some 10 months and have the new projects ready to go when the good season comes. Hope we are going in the right direction. Angelo