Objective 2:
Conserving plant diversity

Conservation action must be targeted at those plants and plant habitats most in need. Action will involve a mix of policy and legislative mechanisms as well as specific measures to be undertaken on the ground.

In particular conservation frameworks should be developed for:

• Recovering threatened species
  
• Reversing the impacts of intensive agriculture and forestry
  
• Preventing habitat destruction and ensuring appropriate management
  
• Tackling environmental pollution, including water pollution
  
• Combating the ecological threat posed by non-native invasive species

Recovering threatened species

Although few species have become extinct in Europe in recent years, many have massively reduced populations and ranges, making the need for comprehensive recovery action extremely urgent.

Stimulated by the CBD, some countries have set targets for the recovery of many of their threatened species and are implementing these recovery plans. Others have the infrastructure in place to rescue threatened plants, but these are the exception rather than the rule. Key elements of any species recovery programme should include survey, research, practical action and advice.

The CBD stresses the 'primacy of in situ conservation' for the long-term conservation of biodiversity, but recognises the important supporting role of ex situ conservation. It provides an insurance against extinction in the wild, material for re-introduction, plant breeding and sustainable use programmes, as well as education and research. Techniques include seed and gene banking, in vitro field gene banks, as well as pollen banks.

Co-ordinating agencies for ex situ conservation are the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) and the International Association of Botanic Gardens (IABG).

Reversing the impacts of intensive agriculture and forestry

Farming accounts for 60% of the land surface of Europe. Modern agricultural practice has proved harmful to nature in general, and plant diversity in particular, with the damage greatest in north-west Europe. In places, industrial agriculture has almost eradicated wild plants, and numerous rare habitats have been destroyed.

There has been a spectacular decline of flowers in arable farmland across the whole of Europe. However, less intensively managed farmland, often using traditional farming practices, is of intrinsic conservation value.

The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a driving factor and its impacts are felt beyond the member states. The reform of the CAP showed some successes, but concerns about destructive subsidies and wrong policy measures are ongoing.

Reform is providing as yet limited but increasing opportunities to integrate positive management for plant conservation into agricultural policy. An ongoing challenge is to shift away from production and towards support for environmentally sensitive farming practices.

Conservation of economically important plants

The genetic diversity present in crops and other useful plant species provides the basis for improving sustainable crop production, and for ensuring that useful plant species have sufficient genetic diversity to meet growing and changing human needs.

Europe's flora contains the relatives of a range of economically important plants, especially vegetables, tree fruits, vines and cereals. These have rich wild-gene pools native to Europe and are important as a source of genetic variation for breeding of food crops. There is also a rich diversity of forestry trees. This diversity of traditional land-races and old varieties of food crops is now greatly diminished due to replacement by modern, uniform cultivars.

EU regulations that reduce the number of varieties of a crop that can be sold have proved very damaging to maintaining the diversity of major vegetable crops. However, IPGRI and two European networking programmes (the European Cooperative Programme for Crop Genetic Resources Network ECP/GR, and European Forest Genetic Resources Programme EUFORGEN) are currently assessing the taxonomic and genetic diversity of European wild crop relatives and developing methods to conserve it.

The conservation of plant genetic resources has also been recognised as an objective of international importance through the adoption, by over 150 countries, of the Global Plan of Action on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (1996). In November 2001 an International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources was adopted, to provide a framework for conservation and exchange of plant germplasm, and allowing for the development of appropriate benefit sharing procedures.

Forestry

About 46% of Europe is forested, with the great majority of forests having been managed for centuries often leading to uniformity in age and structure. The proportion of forested land varies greatly from country to country and its extent is increasing. Marginal land is being abandoned and is reverting to scrub and woodland and there is now an increasing trend towards natural regeneration. However, large portions of forests are planted.

Only isolated fragments of primary forests survive, mostly in Scandinavia and south-eastern Europe. These are of the greatest value for plants; research on woodland fungi in Estonia indicates that unmanaged, native woods may contain up to five times as many species as commercially managed woods. The Statement of Forest Principles, adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio, emphasised that the forests in the north should be managed in a sustainable way.

The MCPFE process, the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe, adopted at the Second Ministerial Conference (Helsinki, 1993), inter alia, a definition of sustainable forest management in Europe. In 1998 in Lisbon, the third Ministerial Conference endorsed, inter alia, a Pan-European Work Programme on the Conservation and Enhancement of Biological and Landscape Diversity in Forest Ecosystems, 1997-2000. The MCPFE process guides the conservation and sustainable management of forests in Europe.

Preventing habitat destruction and ensuring appropriate management

While selected targeted actions for specific plant species and species groups will always be necessary, the best way to conserve most plants is to protect and manage the areas where they grow. Protected areas, of all types and sizes, are at the heart of any successful strategy for plant conservation.

The Important Plant Area (IPA) programme can help by identifying the most important sites for plants, thereby underpinning site protection mechanisms. The conservation of IPAs will depend on active management to maintain plant diversity and ecological processes, both within and outside protected area networks.

Every country in Europe has a system of protected areas, and their rate of creation continues, supported by agreed international frameworks such as the Ramsar Convention and the Habitats and Species. Yet the geographical distribution and biological representation are uneven - often biased towards mountain areas, and away from lowland ecosystems, where human pressures are stronger.

Parks for Life (IUCN, 1994) sets out a pan- European strategy for an effective and well managed network of protected areas in Europe. It emphasises the need for protected areas to be integrated into regional planning and recommends that policies for sustainable resource use are developed. Many rare and threatened plants and plant habitats are confined to extremely small areas, especially in the heavily used landscapes of lowland Europe. In response, the Regional Government of Valencia, Spain, has pioneered a special statutory category of microreserve. This has been so successful that there is a call for this approach to be extended throughout Europe.

Networks of Protected Areas

Protected areas should ideally be connected to each other through measures such as linking corridors and 'stepping stones' between core areas. Habitat restoration may be necessary in key areas to achieve this. This will help facilitate the spread of wild plants in response to climate change.

In Europe, the connectivity approach has emerged in the concept of the Pan-European Ecological Network (PEEN), part of PEBLDS. Ministers from 54 countries in the UN-ECE region have endorsed the proposal to establish PEEN by 2005. Realisation of the Natura 2000 network and the Emerald Network will help greatly in the establishment of PEEN.

Addressing environmental pollution, including water pollution

Human-induced climate change is already happening, and the implications for plants and the planet are great. The earth is already about 0.6°C warmer that it was 100 years ago. Emissions of greenhouse gases are exceeding levels which can be removed by natural systems (forests, peat and the oceans).

Furthermore, these systems are already under direct threat from human activity. For many plants their 'climate space' will be altered and policies and management practices must help enable their natural migration and adaptation to these changes.

All plants need nutrients to grow and thrive, but an excess of nutrients from fertilisers, sewage and traffic emissions for example), can affect both their own survival and the wider environment. This 'overfeeding' is known as eutrophication and is a serious environmental problem across Europe. Certain plant groups, such as aquatic plants and lichens are particularly vulnerable. The EU Water Framework Directive is a potentially powerful tool to guarantee maintenance of good ecological quality of water catchments across the European Union and Accession States.

Combating the ecological threat posed by non-native invasive species

The spread of invasive alien species is recognised as a major threat to plant diversity, habitats and ecosystems, and hence to food production and health.

On the north Atlantic fringe of Europe, scrub of Rhododendron ponticum threatens native oak woodlands; in northern and north eastern Europe Crassula helmsii and other invasive aquatic species threaten the flora of often scarce freshwater habitats, and large areas of the Mediterranean coast are taken over by the Hottentot Fig Carpobrotus edulis.

IUCN has stated one prime guiding principle: that the prevention of introduction of the invasive species "is the cheapest, most preferred option and should be given highest priority". Through the Bern Convention, the Council of Europe has developed a European Strategy on Invasive Alien Species, within the framework of the CBD. The Global Invasive Species Programme of the CBD suggests measures are needed to predict, prevent and control problem species:

• Improving understanding and awareness by all sectors of society
  
• Developing adequate risk assessments of species and their pathways
  
• Devising robust codes of conduct
  
• Providing appropriate legal and institutional mechanisms

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Further Information

Global Strategy for Plant Conservation - targets adopted by CBD COP 6:

• 60 per cent of the world's threatened species conserved in situ
  
• 60 per cent of threatened plant species in accessible ex situ collections, preferably in the country of origin, and 10 per cent of them included in recovery and restoration programmes
  
• At least 30 per cent of production lands managed consistent with the conservation of plant diversity
  
• 70 per cent of the genetic diversity of crops and other major socio-economically valuable plant species conserved, and associated local and indigenous knowledge maintained.
  
• At least 10 per cent of each of the world's ecological regions effectively conserved
  
• Protection of 50 per cent of the world's most important areas for plant diversity assured
  
• Management plans in place for at least 100 major alien species that threaten plants, plant communities and associated habitats and ecosystems
  

Suggested long term European action in the EPCS under this objective:

E11 Prepare and implement recovery plans for threatened plant species, with priority for those on the Bern Convention and the Habitats Directive.

E12 Undertake effective ex situ conservation of all European threatened plants and their genetic resources in the countries of origin, within a reasonable time period;

E13 For countries within the EU, continue the reform to the EU Common Agricultural Policy to support agricultural land management practices that will halt and reverse the declines in wild plant biodiversity in the wider countryside;

E14 Outside the EU and accession states, avoid further intensification and ensure careful maintenance of environment-friendly agriculture. Changes in agricultural policy that will benefit wild plants include:
. directing money away from farming subsidies towards environmental stewardship
. ensuring production subsidies are subject to environmental conditions
. reducing use of herbicides by land managers
. introducing bold and innovative solutions for traditionally managed land threatened with abandonment
. restoring natural habitats of rivers, reversing the "canalisation" of rivers by reinstating meanders and water meadows
. restoration and where appropriate recreation of plant-rich habitats on land where biodiversity conservation is compatible with the main use, (such as road and motorway verges, railway embankments, village greens and river banks)
.use of agri-environment schemes to promote incentives for land managers to permit wild arable plants in field margins
. the extension of organic farming
. use of agri-environment measures in botanically important areas
. increasing the use at national level of the environmentally beneficial aspects of Agenda 2000 reforms, such as acreage payments, agri-environment measures, and policy for Less Favoured Areas;

E15 Encourage greater involvement by botanists/plant conservationists in fora on agricultural policy;

E16 Produce and implement an integrated plan for conservation of the plant genetic resources of Europe, wild and cultivated;

E17 Continue to revise national forestry policies in order to support the further implementation of the MCPFE commitments.

E18 Key forestry management practices to benefit wild plants include:
. the continuation of the trend by forestry agencies and companies towards less intensive forest management
. leaving areas uncut with dead trees left standing, where appropriate, to support fungi
. use of native species as far as possible in tree planting schemes
. ensuring afforestation does not occur on land of high botanical value
. ensuring effective training and monitoring of forest managers in sustainable forestry principles and practice
. ensure biodiversity sensitive management of commercial forestry in protected areas
. removing trees where detrimental afforestation has occurred on land of high botanical value/protected areas;

E19 Ensure protection of remaining old-growth natural forests of conservation importance that are not yet protected, and of semi-natural forests, such as areas that have never been clear-felled but have been managed sustainably.

E20 In EU countries continue the implementation of and full adherence to the Habitats Directive, with an increased emphasis on protection of the flora species on Annex II;

E21 In countries external to the EU continue the implementation of and full adherence to the Bern Convention; focus on the establishment of the Emerald Network as a major contribution to PEEN;

E22 Encourage liaison between those involved in selecting sites for the Natura 2000 and Emerald Networks and teams Identifying Important Plant Areas; E23 Speed up of the integration of the provisions of the Habitats Directive into national law where this has not been done;

E24 At the appropriate time, reconsider the plant species on Annex II and the habitats on Annex I of the Habitats Directive, especially regarding the inclusion of cryptogams;

E25 Consider how the Ramsar Convention could improve the conservation of wetlands and aquatic plants and urge national governments to use this opportunity for the benefit of plant diversity;

E26 Carry out conservation action on IPAs that are not already in protected area networks;

E27 Consider the recommendations in the Parks for Life Action Plan in national programmes and policies;

E28 In each country promote the use of the full range of protected areas in IUCN categories I-V;

E29 Create more IUCN Category II national parks and upgrade the protection of sites that aspire to IUCN categories II and V;

E30 Continue to implement Parks for Life for new World Heritage sites for Europe ensuring key plant sites are included;

E31 Continue to develop biological corridors across Europe;

E32 Consider a set of natural sites for the Alpine region;

E33 Consider the establishment of the microreserve approach for plant conservation developed by the Generalitat Valenciana (regional government of Valencia, Spain) by other countries and regions and help to promote the micro-reserve concept across Europe;

E34 Actively encourage the management and conservation by each botanic garden of at least one area of natural or semi-natural vegetation of botanical importance;

E35 Continue emphasis on the appropriate management of nature reserves, to protect rare plants and plant communities;

E36 Develop a holistic institutional, policy and legislative framework on invasive alien species.