Czech ecologists and farmers urge joint care for the landscape

A group of ecologists, farmers and local government representatives in Czechia has put forward a joint initiative, calling on the authorities to pool their efforts in caring for the country's landscape. Among the initiators are David Čip, a landscape-care expert in the Hradec Králové Region, and Milan Šimonovský, chairman of the Prague Beekeeping Society (covering the Prague 6 and Prague 7 districts). The authors have gathered their proposals in a document called the “Common Agenda for the Care of the Czech Landscape.”

“We need the experience of practitioners to actually be taken into account in decision-making, and for the strategies adopted to lead to concrete steps on the ground. A problem in a single field can end up affecting a fisherman, or an entire community — farming and landscape care are not two separate things,” explained David Čip.

According to the signatories, the state often pays to restore the landscape or repair damage, while at the same time other rules and support programs create the very conditions that make these problems worse. “In this way, public funds can end up being spent on fixing the consequences of problems that it would be more effective and cheaper to prevent in the first place,” Čip noted.

Uncertainty also surrounds the funding of practical landscape care. According to the initiative, the draft state budget for 2027 sets aside no money either for national landscape-shaping programs or for the maintenance that farmers and foresters carry out in protected areas. Funding has already fallen sharply in several regions in 2025: for example, at the regional branch of the Nature and Landscape Protection Agency in the Vysočina Region, funds for the relevant care programs have been cut by two-thirds.

The signatories also point to the problem of working conditions for the people themselves who are involved in landscape care: in their view, the state has failed to create a sufficiently stable and predictable environment for work that is planned years and decades ahead. Rules, priorities and the public funds available, they say, can change far faster than the way the land itself is farmed. One of the key problems, the signatories believe, is that decisions about one and the same landscape are made simultaneously through several different systems.

Around Prague, based on reporting by ekolist.cz