This report aims to provide a fair reflection of the progress, the achievements and obstacles in the integration of environmental concerns into EU agriculture policy, based on indicators developed in the IRENA operation. It also tackles limitations to successful policy implementation at Member State level, and challenges ahead.
Policy examples from some Member States aim to show good practice in agri-environmental policy implementation or design. Due to the scope of the IRENA operation the analysis focuses on the EU-15 Member States.
There are different possibilities for analysing policy integration, ranging from an in-depth investigation of policy processes in the social science research tradition, or analytical approaches based on a set of integration criteria, to a pragmatic analysis of the targeting of policy instruments on the environmental issues to be addressed in a given sector. This report follows the latter approach as the results of agri-environment indicator work under the IRENA operation provide a good basis for attempting to look at the environmental targeting of agricultural policy instruments in the EU. In addition to the targeting analysis, the report also evaluates the usefulness of the currently available information framework itself for assessing policy integration.
In developing the report the aim is to link the analysis to the integration strategy endorsed by the Agriculture Council and other EU policy documents that are relevant to the policy integration debate, such as the EU Sustainable Development Strategy.
The report builds on a combination of:
• Outlines of the external and internal drivers behind agricultural trends, partly derived from IRENA indicator fact sheets (Chapter 2);
• The identification of the key agri-environmental issues at stake in different regions of the EU and at Community level, based on the comprehensive indicator analysis carried out in the IRENA indicator report (Chapter 3);
• A review of the EU agri-environmental policy framework and its implementation in Member States (Chapter 4);
• An analysis of the targeting of agri-environmental policy instruments to environmental issues described by IRENA indicators (Chapter 5); this chapter applies the analytical framework to two key environmental issues: minimising nutrient pollution risk and the conservation of farmland biodiversity;
• An assessment of the usefulness of the agri-environmental information system developed under IRENA for analysing policy integration (Chapter 6).

By: European Environment Agency

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