Impacts of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy "Greening" Reform on Agricultural Development, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Services

Abstract

The EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has had limited success in mitigating agriculture's environmental degradation. In this paper we simulate the impacts of the 2013 "greening" reform on biodiversity and ecosystem services in environmentally contrasting landscapes. We do this by integrating an agent-based model of structural change with spatial ecological production functions, and show that the reform will likely fail to deliver substantial environmental benefits. Our study implies that greening measures need to be tailored to local conditions and priorities, to generate environmental improvements. Such spatial targeting of measures is though incompatible with the design of a common direct payments scheme.

Keywords

agent‐based modeling; biodiversity; CAP reform; Ecological Focus Areas (EFA); ecosystem services; landscape; spatial production functions

Published in

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy
2020, Volume: 42, number: 4, pages: 716-738 Publisher: WILEY

SLU Authors

• Brady, Mark

  • Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Lund University

UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13037

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/109337