WWF's Agriculture and Biodiversity Initiative - Activities

Meeting the Challenge

For every challenge that agriculture provides to conserving biodiversity, it also offers an opportunity.

While agricultural operations can threaten habitats, pollute waters, and consume resources, they can also - when operations are sustainably managed - provide new habitats, help protect watersheds, and improve soil health.

On-going and anticipated activities of the Agriculture and Biodiversity Initiative, in collaboration with agricultural experts and researchers, investors, institutes and universities, government agencies, producers, manufacturers, retailers, and other food industry interests, include:

• Establishing collaborative projects with producers in priority ecoregions to identify and accelerate adoption of Better Management Practices (BMPs).
  
  
• Helping create BMP-based codes of practice and investment screens for more sustainable production of key globally traded commodities.
  
  
• Creating the protocols and securing funds for a revolving loan fund to cover the transition costs of adopting BMPs.
  
  
• Developing and field testing tools to measure agricultural impacts in order to monitor performance of ecolabels, certification programs, and public policy initiatives aimed at reducing adverse environmental impacts.
  
  
• Analyzing the environmental impacts of subsidies and market barriers on global production and developing alternative polices that promote the adoption of BMPs.
  
  
• Supporting research on such issues as:
  • the costs and barriers to rehabilitating degraded land,
  • the financial and ecological impacts of retiring marginal agricultural land,
  • the development of tradeable development rights to reduce environmental impacts and increase profitability in areas of agricultural expansion, and
  • the development of monitoring systems to track effluent problems back to their sources and work with producers to reduce them.