Feature : Environmental protection

Alongside the parks and reserves set up by the French public authorities, France’s regional nature conservation boards buy or rent threatened natural sites which they manage in partnership with local authorities and individual property owners. Their objective is to safeguard an apparently commonplace yet irreplaceable traditional landscape.

Lying ten kilometres from Rouen, the Roule coast forms a wall of greenery which, until the nineteen fifties, was occupied by the last free-ranging sheep in the region. Since then, left to itself, the coast began to become overgrown and would have been inescapably wooded without the action led, from 1992, by the Conservatoire des Espaces Naturels de Haute-Normandie. The organisation has introduced its own sheep breeding unit here, "mowers on legs" ideal for restoring the turf and keeping it in good condition. Today, once more, large numbers of rare flowers flourish here (including twelve species of orchids) and magnificent butterflies, to the delight of local town-dwellers, surprised to discover such a natural wealth so close to home.

France has one of the richest and most diverse natural countrysides in Europe. With 4,700 plant species, it is home to no less than 40% of the flora of the Old Continent. Thus it is possible to see desert areas in Provence and Arctic peat bogs in the high Jura, to wonder at praying mantises on dry lawns up to the Belgian border, and otters in the fast-running, pure waters of Limousin.

Preserving biodiversity

These sites remarkable for their biodiversity occupy a total of some 125,000 km2, or almost a quarter of the nation’s territory! But their size is shrinking, eaten into by a devouring urbanisation and by the uncontrolled intensification of agriculture and forestry. Certainly some strong protective measures (see box) have been implemented by the government. Primarily covering coastal and mountain area, their aim is to conserve major features, far from the pressures of man. "In other places," points out Daniel Béguin, president of Espaces naturels de France - the national body of the Conservatoires - "on 95% of the nation’s land, those very areas which contain most of our natural heritage, there is still everything to do." Yet, ordinary natural settings merit special attention for they play a vital role in conserving biological diversity.

To fill this gap, and through the impetus of nature conservation bodies, in 1976 the first Regional Natural Areas Conservation Society (CREN) was set up in Alsace. The enthusiasm aroused by this private initiative, common in Anglo-Saxon countries but unheard of in France, encouraged other regions to provide themselves with comparable instruments. They set up a unique system for protecting threatened sites, in partnership with private and public owners, based on actions taken by the State.

Any type of area, of whatever size, can be protected by the CRENs: rocky off-shore islets, bat caves, natural prairies, turf-covered chalk downlands, traditional orchards, and above all, wetland areas. Pools, peat-bogs and alluvial forests form more than half of the sites protected.

Consensual ecological management

Very pragmatically, the naturalists of the Conservatoires have abandoned militant campaigning to seek the broadest possible consensus between local councillors, the public, scientists, administrations, farmers, hunters... To avoid controversy, they base their activities on the work of a scientific advisory council which, in each region, brings together top experts on their subject (botany, geology, ornithology, mammalian research, etc.). They also rely on an army of several thousand volunteers and on increasingly highly qualified staff, including a large number of environment specialists as well as experts on development and financial aid.

In twenty-five years the Conservatoires have bought some 5,000 hectares of land, primarily agricultural, from private owners. What are their criteria for selection? "We favour biological diversity and the fragility of the site, but also the sustainability of the purchase." explains Daniel Béguin. "Rather than pay 100,000 francs  [1] per hectare in an urban area, to preserve very fragile relics, under enormous pressure from developers, we prefer to move 40 kilometres away and with the same money save an area twenty times larger."

But the majority of the sites are most frequently rented on long term leases (up to ninety-nine years) from communes in return for one symbolic franc. Often the owners of places of outstanding natural beauty (common grazing land), local authorities would rather entrust their conservation to a CREN, which takes on responsibility for mobilising its scientific and logistical skills and obtaining the necessary financial backing from various sources (European Union, State, Region, Département).

Some Conservatoires also organise public subscriptions for the purchase of a piece of land or a herd. Bringing in more than 152,460 euros  [2]each year from the country as a whole, they have the advantage of simultaneously making the general public aware of the activities of the Conservatoires, by making each subscriber the "owner of a little piece" of wild countryside. This sort of action is only one of many methods (visits to sites, popularizing works, newsletters, etc.) used by the CRENs to fulfil one of their main objectives: "To inform, educate and increase public awareness in order to safeguard an irreplaceable landscape asset, a living heritage which must be passed on to future generations".

Once a site has been purchased, the conservation society provides specific ecological management for it. Drawn up and approved by the organisation’s scientific advisory council, it gives rise to the drafting of "management plans" designed to care for, develop or restore the biological value of the habitat. Thus on the Glénan islands in Brittany, it proved necessary to reestablish the practice of keeping livestock in order to ensure the survival of the Glénan narcissus, a sub-species which grows only on the small Armorican archipelago. The result has been spectacular: in a few years the number of plants has risen from 6,500 to 60,000!

Thanks to this consensual policy, the Conservatoires now manage more than 1,200 natural sites all over France, which represent a total area of more than 36,000 hectares. Twenty-five years of effort have made it possible to conserve almost 10% of the 14,500 areas of outstanding natural beauty or interest in France. The objective stated at the start to ultimately protect 100,000 hectares of natural areas is thus no longer a utopian ideal, although there is a long way to go, for in the same period of time, 10% of protected sites recorded have also been irredeemably destroyed...

• Espace naturels de France.
Maisons des Conservatoires régionaux d’espaces naturels.
Ecomusée (Ecomuseum).
68190 Ungersheim.
Tel.: (33-3) 89 83 34 10.
Fax: (33-3) 89 83 34 11.