Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, a cooperative banking group and company with a mission, has announced the renewal of its partnership with the Alli'Homme association, which is responsible for the contractual monitoring and technical implementation of environmental services between farmers and private companies. The main aim of the partnership is to boost the water retention capacity of several hectares of farmland upstream of the Quimper basin (29), which is vulnerable to flooding. The association's first customer 3 years ago, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is keen to strengthen and renew its investment alongside the region's agricultural players, from the innovative angle of contracting environmental services.

Environmental Services are voluntary contracts that pay farmers for actions that help restore or maintain the environmental functions of their land, such as biodiversity resources and habitats, carbon storage in soils and hedgerows, water purification and run-off regulation.

Incentive payments based on results, over and above mere compensation for costs, make it possible to ensure risk-taking and provide long-term support for transitions. Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne's agriculture market and the Crédit Mutuel Arkéa group's sustainable finance department worked in synergy with the Alli'Homme association to create a legal framework enabling private companies to contribute to the funding of these initiatives, while benefiting from reliable reporting to certify the impact of changes in farming practices.

The first private-private contract for the provision of environmental services was signed three years ago between Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne and the Alli'Homme association. It has enabled Philippe Boete, a livestock farmer in Quéménéven (29), to optimise the winter cover of his wetlands, to take account of his area's vulnerability to flooding. Thanks to the PES, the farmer agreed to extend his grassed strips and experiment with the technique of sowing cover crops under maize, previously considered too costly and risky. Annual reporting showed a positive assessment at the end of the three years, from a technical, environmental and societal point of view, which led to the renewal of the partnership for the next three years.