Ecological interventions in agricultural landscapes - scale matters!

Abstract:
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) affects about half of the land area of the EU and allocates close to 40% of the EU’s budget. Consequently, CAP has great potential to guide land management decisions towards multifunctional agricultural landscapes supporting both commodity production and biodiversity. The 2015 “greening” reform was an attempt to increase the multifunctionality of agricultural landscapes, but has been heavily criticized as a failure. Among other things, there are complaints that interventions proposed to benefit public goods are of inadequate quality and the rules for their implementation lack a landscape perspective. The research done in MULTAGRI investigated how a landscape perspective could be used to develop more cost-efficient interventions and Agricultural policies.