“Open Landscape” Conservation Project

Romania’s Hartibaciu Highlands are said to be the last medieval cultural landscape in Europe. A place where the richness and diversity of culture has created the richness and diversity of nature, with vibrant hay meadows, diverse and small-scale agriculture, old trees and CCF 2024 9 forests. This rich mosaic provides shelter and food for so many, including species and crafts that have long since disappeared elsewhere. They are the reason why this landscape was designated as the largest terrestrial protected area in Romania under Natura 2000—a network of nature protection areas within the European Union.

However, most of the regulations and national legislations are not being respected. For 20 years, the Hârtibaciu Valley has seen a dramatic intensification of industrial-scale agriculture. Investors and corporations have been buying up land, consolidating it, and grazing it intensively with Angus cattle or planting monocultures of crops—corn, rape, sunflowers. As a result, the biodiverse mosaic landscape created by small scale farmers is disappearing, and with it, a traditional way of life dating back hundreds of years. Historical pathways people have used for centuries are blocked and corridors that wild animals used to migrate are cut off by hundreds of kilometers of electric fencing.

CCF has recently become a fully registered charity in Romania. Working with Peisaj Deschis, a federation of local and national associations that aim to sustain and promote the Open Landscape of the Transylvanian Highlands by supporting local rural communities and conserving the diversity of wildlife, our aim is to help stop the exploitation of the cultural landscape, its wildlife, and its stewards, in the following ways.

• Legal action: We are supporting the engagement of a team of lawyers to better understand the legal context for these infractions, identify violations, and to take action. Peisaj Deschis collects and documents possible violations, making complaints to the relevant authorities, which have resulted in fines and actions.

• Research: We support research and the collection of data: Interviews with smallholder farmers bringing context to landscape development issues; mapped fences overlayed with ecological corridors to show the scale of the problem; bird surveys to help reveal the effects of land use on avian communities; and camera traps help to identify how large mammals movement may be affected by the fences.

• Land purchase and restoration: Where needed, we are prepared to purchase vital land parcels and secure their protection, restore their endemic ecology and turn them into a living laboratory of the region’s biodiversity—and, ultimately, turning them back over to local communities.

Over the past year, as necessary groundwork for the legal action we are pursuing to combat illegal agriculture and fencing, we have submitted disclosure requests to 8 regional municipalities (“comunas”) in order to gain clarity on local statutes and determine precisely which laws are being broken as a result of rampant illicit fencing, manure dumping, and meadow razing that continues to plague the region. Obtaining the required information is a complicated process pursued through multiple legal channels in parallel. While we anticipate a long and challenging process of 3-5 years, we have a long-term horizon and remain committed to achieving our mission to put a stop to these environmentally devastating activities.

Impact Overview:

• $23,000 legal expenditure in 2023; anticipating up to $500,000 in total legal funding

• Having recently registered the Romanian subsidiary of the CCF (CCF Transylvania SRL), we are now well positioned to pursue our broader land conservation and historic building preservation objectives.

• The collection of data and research was compiled and displayed in a large exhibition open to the public. This exhibition is now travelling through the region and has already been seen by over 2,000 people.