Policy background

The new CAP (2003 reform) aims at stimulating the European agriculture´s development towards more competitiveness on global markets, but also towards ensuring environmental soundness, supporting rural viability and to better meeting consumers demands. For that purpose, from 2005 on direct payments are decoupled from production. An increasing share of agricultural incomes are expected to be realized by individual contracts, e.g. for agri-environmental measures.
MEA-Scope analyses in how far policies lead to a change the farm structure of a region, or influence farmers decision making on cropping or husbandry management practises, and the economic, environmental and social impacts. The multifunctionality concept particularly requires a spatially and thematically targeted implementation of policies. Accordingly, MEA-Scope developed future scenarios by applying participatory approaches that involved end –users (EC officials), regional stakeholders, scientific experts and modellers (Fig. 1).
 
MEA-Scope modelling tool

Future land use scenarios were transformed into possible future policy settings and implemented in a modelling approach. The modelling procedure builts on three linked micro-economic/ environmental models: AgriPoliS (IAMO, Halle, DE), MODAM (ZALF, Muencheberg, DE), FASSET/ Farm-N (DIAS, Tjele, DK). A specifically developed upscaling procedure allows for reading in geoinformation data into the models for a chosen region. The webtool will be presented in a specific session of the final workshop.

Assessment of policy impacts towards multifunctionality

Typical farms of a region (up to several hundred) are identified from databases available at EU level, and spatially distributed in a landscape map. The agent-based model AgriPoliS simulates the structural change induced by  policy scenarios over a time period of 10 year. The farm model MODAM delivers the likely changes in cropping patterns and the resulting impacts on farm economic and environmental performance More detailed information on losses and surpluses of energy and matter flows (e.g. nitrate, green house gas emissions) are gained from the third linked model, Farm-N/FASSET. The MEA-Scope tool links the three models by creating technical interfaces for the data flow and provides a procedure to combine geodata information, statistical data and detailed management practice simulations from decision support approaches for a multifunctionality impact assessment at different scales. This is carried out by the use of a set of indicators for NCOs. The MEA-Scope tool will be online accessible within the year 2007. Exemplarily for the 7 European case study regions, it will allow for balancing the strengths and weaknesses of different policy options. 

Partner project TOP-MARD

With the same task but with a different approach the partner project TOP-MARD was launched to explore the concept of “multifunctionality” as applied to European agriculture. In the final MEA-Scope workshop both projects will present and discuss their approaches and results and will share their experiences with the attending experts.