Cool Farm Biodiversity Tool
What is Cool Farm Biodiversity for?
The Cool Farm Biodiversity tool quantifies how well your farm management practices support biodiversity, at farm scale. It is most appropriate for arable, livestock and mixed farms.
Points are awarded for wildlife-friendly actions in four areas: Diversity of products; Production practices; Small natural habitats; and Larger natural areas and landscape.
Points are also awarded separately for eleven different groups of species (elements of biodiversity), to allow farms to set different objectives for their biodiversity management.
The purpose of providing scores is to allow organisations in the supply or value chain to quantify their baseline impact on biodiversity at farm scale, and to measure and drive improvements over time.
At present, the tool does not make specific suggestions for improvement, but this will be a future development. It is possible to see from the transparent scoring where improvements could be made to enhance scores.
How does Cool Farm Biodiversity work?
The actions listed are those expected to benefit on-farm biodiversity, according to the judgement of farm biodiversity experts. The current version applies only to Northern and Western Europe and ares of North America where conditions match the temperate forest biome. For different regions of the world, the actions and biodiversity objectives (groups of species) are likely to be different. Relevant versions for other regions will be a future development.
The scoring is evidence-based. The scores assigned to each action are weighted according to scientific evidence, compiled and assessed by the University of Cambridge Conservation Evidence project, working with international panels of biodiversity experts. The underlying evidence is openly accessible at conservationevidence.com. As evidence improves, our assessments may be updated, so the scores may change.
Actions with high quality evidence of benefit, from many different studies, get two additional points. Actions with not enough evidence to be sure of an effect, or some evidence that they may have no benefit, do not get any additional points, although still get a single point as they are considered by experts to be beneficial. There are no actions in the list for which there is strong evidence of no benefit to biodiversity.
Scores are assigned for the general action, and separately for the different species groups. For instance, if you select ‘field margins sown with perennial flowering seed mixes (nectar and pollen for beneficial insects)’ [question 3.2], you get 3 points added to your overall score, and 3 points for beneficial insects, but no additional points for woodland or wetland flora, as there is no clear evidence these groups would benefit from this action.
The tool has been kept as simple as possible. It has 31 questions, and 157 possible answers to choose from. For most questions, respondents simple tick ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or all that apply.
Seven questions ask for land areas or lengths of particular features on your farm. These allow the tool to measure the amount of different habitat types on your farm. This is important information for landscape-scale conservation, and may provide a focus for improvement, but it does not affect the scoring.
What do these scores and graphs mean?
The ‘General Biodiversity Results’ show a percentage of the maximum possible score for each component. These are shown separately, not combined into one score, because they are not equivalent or comparable. Their relative importance depends on what aspects of biodiversity are valued.
The ‘Species Group Results’ show the percentage of the maximum possible score for each of the eleven species groups (in the bar chart), and the actual scores for each species group (in the table).
‘Land use for nature’ shows how the land you manage breaks down into different habitat types, productive areas managed for nature and productive areas without nature management.
What does a good score look like?
To get the maximum score, you would need to do all the possible recommended actions and have all the habitat types. This would require a mixed farm, since some actions are only applicable to livestock or arable farms. A mixed farm that carries out all the available beneficial practices will generate 100% scores for all four components and all 11 species groups.
Your score should be compared with scores from other similar farm types, which will be a future development of the Cool Farm Biodiversity Tool, and become possible over time. It should also be measured over time in your farm(s), to track improvement.
Acknowledgements: The Cool Farm Biodiversity tool was jointly developed by University of Cambridge, CLM and Cool Farm Alliance, with coding and design by Anthesis Consulting Group. This work was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council with support from the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS) programme. BESS is a six-year programme (2011-2017) funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as part of the UK’s Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) programme.
