Agri-Environmental Indicators: A Selected Review to Support Impact Assessment of New EU Green Deal Policies

Abstract

Every intervention of planning, implementation, and monitoring of agricultural and agri-environmental policies requires assessment tools that should have the characteristics of relevance, completeness, interpretability, data quality, efficiency, and overlapping. Despite the extensive selection of bibliographies and numerous projects designed to develop agri-environmental indicators necessary for assessing the sustainability of new policies, it is difficult to have an integrated and updated set of indicators available, which can be an effective and practical application tool to assists policymakers, researchers, and actors in policy design, monitoring and impact assessment. Particularly, such a need is pressing to face the new environmental challenges imposed by the upcoming European Union Green Deal on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post 2023. This study, therefore, aims to fill this gap by proposing a selection methodology and different pools of agri-environmental indicators differentiated based on a scale approach (crop-farm-district-region). Furthermore, we have attempted to apply our approach by quantifying selected indicators for a specific evaluation necessity, represented in this case by an assessment of the environmental impact of land use change induced by CAP greening requirements in the Northern Italy context. Results of this validation show original crops’ impacts comparison, but also highlight great knowledge gaps in the available literature.