EEA’s report “Water and agriculture: towards sustainable solutions” (EEA 2020a) provides a thematic assessment of agricultural practices in Europe and their implications for water resources. Central to this assessment was the description of four key pressures on water originating from agricultural activities: Pollution from nutrients; pollution from pesticides; water abstraction for irrigation; agricultural land use in the floodplain.
This paper describes the data, methodology and results of an analysis that shows variation of farming-related pressures exerted on freshwaters depending on agricultural landscape types. Adopting the present-day farming landscape typology of Levers et al. (2018) (who delineated different types of agricultural land use intensities), it derives 15 broad European agricultural regions (BEAR), specifies their pressure-profiles, and derives the composite multi-pressure index. The index includes the four aforementioned pressures, using datasets available with European coverage aggregated at the level of more than 30 000 river catchment units. Further analysis on linking agricultural production to the pressure index is given in the annex.
In total, 15 different BEARs were defined, which show different combinations and intensities of pressures on water from agriculture. The most abundant BEARs were ‘Extensive grassland and fallow farmland‘ (covering 25 % of catchments) and ‘Western intensive cropland‘ (covering 17 % of catchments).
The most intense composite multi-pressure indices were identified for the ‘Mediterranean intensive cropland’ located in parts of Spain, Italy and Greece (Figure 1). In this BEAR, most pressures, including pollution from pesticides, water abstraction for irrigation and agricultural land use in the floodplain are particularly high, whereas nitrogen surplus is lower. The regions with the lowest composite multi-pressure indices were ‘Northern and Highland livestock farming’ and ‘Extensive grassland area and fallow farmland’.
Figure 1: Composite agricultural pressure index classifying the average intensity of multiple pressures from agriculture on water bodies in a catchment
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