This Wednesday, March 10, 2021, elected officials, farmers, scientists and agronomists gathered in Guilliers around the same idea: to make Lac au Duc and the Guilliers sector an area of experimentation for the implementation of Payments for Environmental Services. (PSE) as a tool for reclaiming water quality.
What are Payments for Environmental Services?
The approach is innovative: it involves remunerating the services rendered by farmers to the environment in order to have a more constant supply (beneficiary-payer approach). Whether in agricultural plots or at the edge of fields, farmers maintain the territories and contribute through their management choices (soil cover, establishment of hedges, etc.) to optimizing their environmental performance: carbon storage beneficial to the climate, preservation biodiversity, water retention, etc. The construction of these projects around private law contracts allows private companies wishing to act for the environment to supplement the financing of these projects and thus enhance their CSR and their local roots.
How does it get set up?
Since 2017, the partners of the Interreg CPES project (Syndicat Mixte du Grand Bassin de l'Oust, Université Rennes 1, INRAE and CNRS) have been working to identify the agricultural plots eligible for these Payments for Environmental Services.
As a result of this work, a new partnership was created, associating the Brittany Chamber of Agriculture (CRAB) and Alli'Homme in the project consortium. The Alli'Homme association, which has already set up a PES contract in Finistère, is providing both legal and private fundraising skills. The CRAB, for its part, provided its expertise in terms of analyzing all the environmental services provided by agriculture (climate and biodiversity, in addition to water quality.
And now?
This Wednesday March 10, fifteen volunteer farmers responded to reflect on how to improve the environmental services provided by their farms and build a PES offer. After presenting them the studies carried out over the past 4 years as well as a range of services; farmers, researchers, facilitators and elected officials took turns to speak about the sustainability of PES, the recognition of peasant efforts, collective and territorial commitment, and the financing of the system.
A new meeting will be organized by the end of March in Guilliers with these same farmers in order to determine the value of these services. In parallel, the project consortium will continue its work of fundraising with private companies.
