HNV Link: A network for sharing High Nature Value farming Learning, Innovation and Knowledge
Dissemination in action in the Dartmoor LA. Pictures: Caroline Sullivan
Extensive, nature-friendly High Nature Value (HNV) farming systems face long-standing threats from both the intensification of production and the abandonment or degradation of farmland and socio-economic decline.
The challenge is to increase the socio-economic viability of HNV farming while maintaining those nature (and other) values which make HNV farmland so special, including ecosystem services provided to the society. This requires an innovative approach to a whole range of challenges – technical, marketing, social and political.
Sharing such innovations through a transnational multi-actor, 13 partner, approach is the motivation behind the HNV-Link network, supported under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme.
HNV-Link sprang from work of the EIP-AGRI Focus Group on HNV Farming Profitability.
Ten of the project partners are responsible for areas where HNV farming systems are prevalent and where appropriate innovations have been made. These are the network’s so-called Learning Areas (LA), which span a cross section of Europe. The project links the areas into a peer-learning process and harnesses their innovation expertise for use in other HNV farmland regions.
The project has three elements:
Innovation seminar in the Burren LA. Picture: James Moran
- Describing the baseline situation, the likely fate of HNV farming in the LA under a ‘business as usual’ scenario and the innovation needs
- Collecting inventories of existing innovation within the LA and of relevant innovations elsewhere in the same Member States (MS), and describing the framework within which innovation currently occurs (relevant actors and mechanisms)
- Dissemination and exchanges of innovation between the LA and partners, with others in the same MS and with the wider EU
HNV Link partners introduced to the HNV French Mediterranean landscape. Picture: James Moran
EFNCP is directly involved in two of the LA: Dartmoor in the UK and La Vera in Spain. The lead partner in La Vera is Fundación Entretantos and further details are available on their project website (in Spanish).
To learn more about the project as a whole, including outputs for the project as a whole, click this link and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
