Environmental Sustainability in the Common Agricultural Policy and the EU Taxonomy

Lámfalusi, Ibolya – Hámori, Judit – Rózsa, Andrea – Goda, Pál

Keywords: common agricultural policy, EU taxonomy, agriculture, sustainability, Q02, Q1, Q18, Q51

The European Green Deal, the European Union's (EU) long-term strategy to achieve the climate neutrality goals of the Paris Agreement by 2050, sets high environmental expectations for the economic operators. Actors of agricultural and food supply chains have to comply not only with the green requirements of the common agricultural policy (CAP), but also the market financing is being transformed as a result of the EU taxonomy regulation. The question arises: how the environmental requirements of the EU taxonomy and the green objectives of the CAP are in line with each other for the period 2021-27. In our study, the green requirement system of the CAP and the taxonomy are compared using the CAP indicator set.
The results show that the objectives of the CAP and the taxonomy are largely consistent with each other. Most of the CAP indicators are aligned with the taxonomy’s objectives and their sub-dimensions, and more complex relations can be found between them than the denomination of the objectives suggest. It should be emphasized that the indicators measure the different taxonomy objectives to varying extent, partly because of their number and partly because of their nature (indicators aimed at KAP program-level evaluation cannot be interpreted at plant level). Moreover, based on the results of our analysis, the CAP’s set of environmental indicators does not cover the whole value chain from farm to fork. The number of indicators is not sufficient enough to measure the transition to circular economy, which is more important for the food industry, therefore additional indicators need to be developed.

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