Fundatia ADEPT: Saving Transylvania's Hay-Meadow Grasslands

Founded in 2004, Fundatia ADEPT works with smallholder farmers across the Târnava Mare area of Transylvania — a roughly 85,000-hectare site of European conservation importance — to keep traditional, low-intensity haymaking and grazing alive on grasslands that support exceptional plant and insect diversity. ADEPT designed and helped introduce Romania's High Nature Value grassland payment scheme, a mechanism now supporting grassland management on 1.2 million hectares nationwide. Locally, roughly 8,000 hectares of Târnava Mare grassland receive targeted incentive payments, and the foundation is now piloting biodiversity credits to keep smallholders farming these meadows rather than abandoning or intensifying them.