European Commission Press note.

“Territorial” nature of agriculture essential to detecting environmental problems

“Public concern about the landscape is on the increase”, according to the second publication of “The territorial dimension of European agriculture” that was released today. With a view to developing agri-environmental indicators through the analysis of land cover data, the publication comprises eight papers which argue that the territorial dimension of agriculture is a key element in understanding its development. Given that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) “no longer treats EU agriculture as merely an economic system but more as an integrated territorial complex”, it now has a range of policy instruments available to it that encourage more sustainable farming practices. These must now be defined at regional and local levels in order to develop a well-founded and consistent system of agri-environmental indicators that will contribute to the detection of environmental problems.

The product of a collaboration between the European Environment Agency, Eurostat, the Joint Research Centre, and the Environment and Agriculture DGs, the publication mainly concentrates on the results of integrating statistical and administrative data with land and cover information. The main questions raised relate to the integration process of the different data sources. Future work will pay particular attention to exploiting the available data, and on the modelling inherent in any future data merge.

For the full text please see: http://themes.eea.eu.int/Sectors_and_activities/agriculture/reports

Links are also available from the following:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/eurostat/index_en.htm http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/environment/index_en.htm http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/agriculture/index_en.htm http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int/index.asp