Biodiversity initiative: ‘We don’t want parts of the country sealed off’

Would the initiative up for vote in Switzerland on September 22 lead to a better protection of biodiversity or more headaches for farmers? A recent debate by SWI swissinfo.ch explored the pros and cons.

Some 56,000 animal species and 230 types of natural area are to be found in Switzerland. But some of this biological diversity is under threat, warns the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment.

The “biodiversity initiative”, proposed by nature and environmental groups, wants to create a constitutional article to oblige public authorities to give more resources and space to nature. Swiss voters will have their say on September 22.

Need for action not in question

“Nobody doubts that biodiversity needs to be protected; however, the initiative goes too far and will have big side-effects,” said Simone de Montmollin from the centre-right Radical-Liberal Party in our recent “Let’s Talk” debate.

In 2012, federal authorities adopted a biodiversity strategyExternal link, later followed by a government action plan to implement it – including measures to ensure the conservation of certain threatened species.

Yet this isn’t enough, reckons Green Party parliamentarian Christophe Clivaz. “An initial evaluation showed that almost all of the aims outlined in the strategy have not been reached,” he said.

Biodiversity decline is even more striking in Switzerland than in most other European countries (see graph below). “These signs should be taken seriously,” said De Montmollin. However, she added, some species – such as certain types of dragonfly – are actually doing better than before.

Clivaz welcomed existing projects to protect biodiversity, which have a positive effect on nature. “Unfortunately, however, the trend is starting to reverse,” he said. “Every year, we are losing species and natural areas.”

Mathis Steinmann, a Swiss citizen living in France, where he studies at the Scientific University in Nice, brought an outside perspective to the debate. “Switzerland is a small, densely populated country with an Alpine biotope,” he told us. “The pressure on the ecosystem is thus more intense than in France, which is made up of several biotopes. France has also passed laws to protect more areas of land [than Switzerland],” he said.

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What’s the solution?

Opponents of the initiative say they are not against its aims but are critical of how it proposes to reach them. “We don’t want parts of Switzerland to be simply sealed off,” said De Montmollin.

Clivaz rejected the accusation that isolating protected areas is being proposed. “This is not the idea, and it’s certainly not what’s written in the [initiative] text,” he said. The Green Party politician said that protected areas already exist in the country which still manage to leave space for tourism, farming or energy production.

De Montmolin was unconvinced, arguing that the initiative would lead to conflicts about the use of land. “[Switzerland] is already small and densely developed, and we also have aims for urbanisation, renewable energy production, and food production,” she said.

She also criticised the initiative’s backers for not taking into account efforts made to date, such as improvements made in agriculture since the 1990s. She called for patience. “Things destroyed over 150 years, between 1850 and the end of the 20th century, cannot be restored in 50 years. We need some leeway,” she said.

For his part, Clivaz maintained that Swiss authorities had not yet realised the scale of the problem. “The problem is that we continue to destroy,” he said. “Today, we are prepared to build six-lane motorways, eating up hectares of farmland for the sake of mobility. All too often, the interests of certain economic sectors take precedence over the interests of nature and the landscape.”

Farms and cities

Sections of the Swiss agriculture sector are firmly against the initiative, fearing that it will limit food production capacities. On the other hand, urban areas are largely in favour, according to a mid-August opinion poll by the gfs.bern research institute.

Faced with the reticence among parts of the rural community, Clivaz said that some 8,000 farmers in Switzerland already work organically. And “these are already fully compatible with what the initiative is demanding”, he said. He also admitted that farmers had made big environmental efforts in recent years – but more remains to be done, he argued.

But De Montmollin reckons that “farmers are fed up with being targeted when the problem is more general”. This was already the case with the two anti-pesticide votes in 2021, and the biodiversity initiative comes now as “the final straw”, she said. “[Farmers] will no longer put up with diktats of any kind.”

The urban-rural divide in Switzerland

Politically opposed, Christophe Clivaz and Simone de Montmollin are both personally connected to the world of agriculture. The former is the son of a winegrower, the latter a trained oenologist. And both see a growing gap between urban and rural populations.

“In towns, people often no longer know where a tomato or a litre of milk comes from,” says Clivaz. However, he also points out that farmers are doing a great deal of outreach work to explain such issues to urbanites.

De Montmollin agrees that “the town-country divide is one of this century’s greatest challenges”. She is also impressed by the communication by farmers in recent years, but says that their message is not heard enough. 

Steinmann meanwhile noted that the divide between town and country is more blatant in France than in the Swiss case. “People who have grown up in the city, even in my biology faculty, have enormous problems understanding the world in which they live,” he remarks. He puts this down to the high degree of centralisation in France, but also to education.

Edited by Samuel Jaberg. Translated from French by Domhnall O’Sullivan