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

Abstract

AbstractIn December 2013, the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council formally adopted the new regulations for the reformed Common Agricultural Policy (2014-2020). The new regulations include three obligatory greening measures: ecological focus areas, maintaining permanent grassland, and crop diversification. We assess the impact of these measures on ecosystem services using scientific and gray literature. The literature review reveals that the adopted greening measures will have mixed effects, i.e., trade-offs and synergies across ecosystems services. Provisioning services, in particular crop production, are expected to decrease when the measures are implemented. All other service categories, i.e., regulating and cultural services, will increase – or are at least will not obviously be negatively affected – once the measures are implemented. However, in terms of tradeoffs 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.