Shades of Greening: Reviewing the Impact of the new EU Agricultural Policy on Ecosystem Services

In December 2013 the Council of EU Agriculture Ministers formally adopted the new regulations for the reformed Common Agricultural Policy (2014-2020). The new regulations include the obligatory greening measures: ecological focus areas, maintaining permanent grassland, and crop diversification. We systematically assess the impact of these measures on ecosystem services using scientific literature. The literature review reveals that the greening measures adopted will have a mixed affect, i.e. trade-offs and synergies across the selected range of ecosystems services. Provisioning services and in particular crop production are expected to decrease when the measures are implemented. All other service categories, i.e. regulating and cultural services will be on the increase – or at least have no clear negative effect – once the measures are implemented. However, in terms of trade-off and synergies, much depends on objectives being pursued, the baseline or alternative land use underlying the comparison, and on the prevalent farming systems and farm characteristics. Including the ecosystem services concept into the design and assessment of policies would allow a systematic review of the consequences of measures also for services otherwise easily ignored. Yet, even with the most detailed literature review the problem of whose preference count most remain.

HAUCK Jennifer;  SCHLEYER Christian;  WINKLER Klara J.;  MAES Joachim; 

2014-11-14

VERSITA

JRC88327

2300-3669,   

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cass.2014.1.issue-1/cass-2014-0006/cass-2014-0006.xml?format=INT,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC88327,