AMENDMENT TO THE ACT ON PROTECTION OF AGRICULTURAL LAND OR BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR SOIL AND CLIMATE PROTECTION?
Abstract
Act No. 334/1992 Coll. on the Protection of the Agricultural Land has been protecting the area and quality of agricultural land for thirty years, and even though the standard of protection has been increased over time, none of this has prevented noticeable decreases of agricultural land area in the Czech Republic. At the same time, the legislation in force somewhat neglects the protection of non-production functions of agricultural land, including the climatic function, although these functions play a fundamental role in the stability of the ecosystem of agricultural land and the requirement to adopt appropriate measures arises from strategic documents adopted at national and EU levels.
The amendment to Act No. 334/1992 Coll. aims to correct the described situation. Authors of this article selected four key changes that the amendment introduces to the Czech legal system - specifically, new definition of the agricultural land fund, which considers landscape elements as part of the agricultural land on which these elements are located, new instrument of agricultural land protection authority to declare the land as agricultural land, new principle of area protection of the agricultural land fund underlining the non-production functions of agricultural land, and finally term "agrivoltaics" considered as a hybrid form of electricity production from solar energy, which preserves concurrent agricultural production.
The selected changes were described from a material and technical point of view, placed in the legal framework of the applicable law and analyzed in terms of possible impacts on the factual and legal situation. The authors concluded that the presented amendment was capable of bringing the current legislation towards goals adopted in strategic documents, unless it undergoes significant modifications in the course of the upcoming discussion by the Parliament of the Czech Republic.