The webinar “Legal Tools for Private Land Conservation in the EU” on 3 June 2020, organised by the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) and the European Land Conservation Network (ELCN), discussed several tools and approaches used for private land conservation. By shedding light on the two ongoing LIFE projects dealing with private land conservation (LIFE ELCN and LIFE Land is Forever) as well as the new Horizon 2020 research project "contracts 2.0", the webinar introduced listeners to some of the most prevalent and promising private land conservation tools in use today.

The first half of the webinar showed which tools are most attractive
(and for which reasons) from a private landowner perspective.
Anne-Sophie Mulier and Jurgen Tack of ELO presented the findings of
large-scale polling of private landowners across the EU and made
suggestions on how to include landowners in the further development of
private land conservation in Europe.

The second half of the webinar addressed voluntary conservation
contracts with a focus on results-based agri-environmental payment (RBP)
schemes as an innovative tools in the EU's Common Agricltural Policy.
The project coordinator of "contracts 2.0", Bettina Matzdorf of the
Centre for Agricultural Landscape Science (ZALF), introduced
participants to the concept of results-based payments and sketched out
the research question of the new H2020 project.

The webinar concluded with a Q&A session dealing with the effectiveness
of various tools and the opportunities and challenges linked to their
implementation. Please note that a recording of the webinar is available here.