Database on Availability of Agri-Environmental Indices in Member States at NUTS3, and Options for Data Collection at Farm Scale. DigitAF EU Project. Deliverable 1.2
Creators: name: Kay, Sonja
name: Wodzinowski, Elias
name: Lawson, Gerry
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: The European Union dearly needs ways to evaluate the success of environmental and climate measures. Currently, each country, legal framework or sector uses its own indicators, and the data, although partly collected at the local level, is often reported only as aggregated data, at the scale of countries (NUTS0). This prevents local decision-makers or practitioners from using this data, in particularly when assessing the impact of implementing agroecological levers such as agroforestry. Therefore, the aim of this report is to identify environmental data that can be used at more local levels (NUTS 4-5) and to provide suggestions on how to improve data collection, aggregation and dissemination in order to provide locally relevant, consistent and reliable data to stakeholders.   

Among the five legal frameworks that we analysed, we identified 14 indicator categories (28 individual indicators) relevant to assess the impact of agroforestry, and identified some of their shortcomings:(i) mixing afforestation and agroforestation, (ii) considering only newly established AF systems and not their maintenance, (iii) reporting agroforestry as several different measures (all mixed with other levers), making it impossible to use the data to estimate the area under agroforestry, (iv) not having agroforestry as an option when separating arable land, permanent crops and permanent grassland and (v) last but not least, not considering a large number of the beneficial effects of agroforestry that would be relevant for other objectives (besides environment) such as fair income, rural areas, food and health. 

Twelve existing impact indicators have been identified as most relevant for farm-scale monitoring of the impact of agroforestry and landscape features. These are: • I.9 Improving the resilience of agriculture to climate change: includes a) agriculture income stability, b) crop production stability for cereals, c) water exploitation index, d) soil organic carbon in agricultural land - only available at NUTS 1 or NUTS 2 (region) level.• I.10 Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture: uses national GHG emission calculations which vary greatly and are usually published only at a national level (NUTS 0). Only a few member states estimate the impact of woody vegetation separately. • I.11 Enhancing carbon sequestration: based on the LUCAS soil survey therefore not available at farm or parcel scale. Averaged to NUTS2.• I.12 Increasing sustainable energy in agriculture - agroforestry can contribute to this, but the indicator is published at national (NUTS 0) scale.• I.13 Reducing soil erosion: scale is different between countries. Usually only published at regional scale (NUTS2).• I.14 Improving air quality: based on manure management and fertilisation, but doesn't yet include the effect of ammonia absorption by tree foliage. Published only at national scale (NUTS 0) • I.15 Improving water quality - reports separately for the potential threat of nitrate and phosphorus on arable land and groundwater. Reports separately for cropland, grassland and permanent crops, but again availability is at the NUTS 0 level, and not for all MS.• I.16 Water use in agriculture: but the frequency of sampling and the density of the monitored stations vary from country to country, as does the number of sampling stations over the years.  Published at river basin level. • I.17 Reducing pressure on water resources: calculated for the Water Exploitation Index but only available at national level, or sometimes for river basins.• I.19 Increasing farmland bird populations. Available at country (NUTS 0) level only. Most species will benefit from hedgerows and trees but other species (e.g. skylark and lapwing) prefer open land - therefore a less integrated index is needed. • I.20 Percentage of species and habitats of Community interest related to agriculture with stable or increasing trends: but again, this is only available at NUTS 2/3 level and relates to broad habitat types • I.21 Agricultural land covered with landscape features: but this is currently only available at NUTS 3 (province) level based on LUCAS data from the JRC, or for woody landscape features based on Copernicus from the EEA 

We make recommendation on which indicators, already reported for existing regulations, could be used for asserting the sustainability requirements of the EU Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Certification (CRCF) Regulation, so as to avoid creating new redundant indicators, and thus facilitate reporting and reducing the control effort for the administration. We consider that agroforestry can make a significant impact in all six areas of sustainability identified by the EU Sustainable Finance Initiative (aka the Taxonomy Regulation): climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, pollution, water resources, the circular economy, biodiversity and ecosystems. 

Taking a farm in DigitAF’s LL in Germany as a case study, we examined the possibility to compute these indicators at even finer scale: farm or field level. The results show promising possibilities using existing database for some indicators, but important bottlenecks in data availability/resolution for others. Therefore, we make several recommendations for improving data collection and provision: i) monitoring emissions at a parcel scale, ii) move to wall-to-wall identification of parcels and land use using the LPIS system and iii) increasing detail in parcel-level databases of soil information and woody vegetation levels, including in hedges, iv) harmonisation with methods used in CRCF certification.

Reporting Agri-Environmental Indicators (AEI) at field or farm scale, and giving access to the data to policy makers and practitioners (farmers) is the best way to allow them to quantify the effect of newly implemented agroforestry. Therefore, if we want to give farmers and policy makers the opportunity to actively evaluate their actions (direct feedback) and potentially reap benefits from agroforestry (carbon farming, biodiversity) as well as truly monitor the impact of environmental policies, the monitoring scale needs to be much finer than it currently is.