Restoring and enhancing rare and threatened habitats under agri-environment agreements: a case study of the chiltern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, UK

Recently, the term “creative conservation” has been coined to describe attempts to restore, recreate and even create wildlife habitat in the wider countryside. However, little attention has been focussed on how these restoration and recreation initiatives could actually be funded or where this conservation effort should be targeted. The environmentally sensitive area (ESA) designation is one of the UK’s largest and most successful environmental conservation schemes operating within the agricultural sector. This paper investigates the need for adjusting the current ESA mechanism in order to maximise the protection and restoration of a threatened habitat (chalk grassland) and designs a model ESA to achieve these objectives. A simple cost comparision is run between the existing ESA mechanism and the model ESA and indicates that a selective targeting approach could avoid unnecessary cost and allow extra funds to be channelled into threatened habitat conservation. It is concluded that the model investigated could also be applied to existing agri-environment initiatives such as the countryside stewardship scheme.