The transition to more sustainable forms of agricultural production to reduce pressures on the water environment require close integration of the implementation of environmental policies with sectoral policies driving agricultural activities and rural development. The Common Agricultural Policy is the main policy that influences the development of the agriculture sector in the EU. It influences how individual farmers choose to manage their land, crops and livestock. In its preamble paragraph, the WFD already highlighted the importance of close integration with the CAP, and RBMPs heavily rely on funding from rural development policies to implement measures on agricultural land (Buchanan et al., 2019).
The current CAP (2014-2020) aims to ensure a stable supply of affordable food, to enable farmers to make a reasonable living and to address climate change and sustainable management of natural resources. The CAP consists in several regulations which are organised around two “pillars”:
According to the legal proposals presented by the European Commission, the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will continue to be financed through these two funds, but a new delivery model based on greater subsidiarity is proposed (EU, 2018b)
Over the time of existence of the CAP and other sectoral policies, considerable progress has been made to streamline environmental objectives. Yet, there is a need for much more ambitious and far-reaching integration given the slow progress towards good status and continued pressure from agriculture on the water environment (ECA, 2014; EEA, 2018d; EC, 2019a).
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