Agricultural and environmental policies must give farmers complementary signals if environmentally sound agricultural practices are to be applied to a sufficient extent. A new policy for rural development was introduced in 1999 as the second pillar of the CAP. This second pillar of the CAP aims to accompany market and income policy (“first pillar”) by providing financial aid to farmers in order to influence rural structures. In its revised version for the period 2014-2020, the Rural Development Policy still includes important biodiversity-friendly measures, like agri-environmental measures, compensatory schemes in Natura 2000 sites, ecological forest-management aid, etc. They have to be scheduled by a national (regional) rural development programme and are co-financed by the EU. These measures can be a useful financial instrument for farmers who face a drop in income as they comply with the set regulations.

One of the six Union priorities for rural development in the period 2014-2020 is restoring, preserving and enhancing ecosystems related to agriculture and forestry with one focus area on “restoring, and preserving and enhancing biodiversity, including in Natura 2000 areas, areas facing natural or other specific constraints and high nature value farming, and the state of European landscapes “. Besides, at least 30 % of the rural development programmes' budget will have to be allocated to agri-environmental measures, support for organic farming, forestry measures or projects associated with environmentally friendly investment or innovation measures. Agri-environmental measures are obligatory for all programmes and will be stepped up to complement greening practices. These measures will have to set and meet higher environmental protection targets (guarantee against double funding).

Another important tool in rural development regulation for promoting the integration of biodiversity that the Member states may chose to use is the “non-productive investments ” support. Support could be granted to investments linked to the achievement of agri-environment-climate objectives including biodiversity conservation status of species and habitat as well as enhancing the public amenity value of a Natura 2000 area or other high nature value systems to be defined in the programme.

Therefore, one priority of this Strategy is to integrate biodiversity aspects better and more clearly in current and future rural development plans. In particular, the elaboration of rural development plans for the period 2014-2020 will be an occasion to streamline integration of biodiversity in these plans at Belgian level.

Furthermore, policies for nature conservation and rural development must take into account the commitments of the Kiev Resolution on biodiversity (2003) which foresees (i) the identification, using agreed common criteria, of all high nature value (HNV) areas in agricultural ecosystems in the pan-European region and (ii) their biodiversity-friendly management through appropriate measures (e.g. instruments of rural development). Designation of HNV and integration of ad hoc protection tools should be fully implemented in the Rural Development Plan.