| Summary: | In December 2013, the EU Agriculture and
Fisheries Council formally adopted the new regulations for
the reformed Common Agricultural Policy (2014-2020). The
new regulations include three obligatory greening measures:
ecological focus areas, maintaining permanent grassland,
and crop diversification. We assess the impact of these
measures on ecosystem services using scientific and gray
literature. The literature review reveals that the adopted
greening measures will have mixed effects, i.e., trade-offs and
synergies across ecosystems services. Provisioning services,
in particular crop production, are expected to decrease when
the measures are implemented. All other service categories,
i.e., regulating and cultural services, will increase – or are
at least will not obviously be negatively affected – once the
measures are implemented. However, in terms of tradeoffs
and synergies, much depends on objectives being
pursued, the baseline or alternative land use underlying the
comparison, and on the prevalent farming systems and farm
characteristics. Including the ecosystem services concept
into the design and assessment of policies would allow a
systematic review of the consequences of measures also for
services otherwise easily ignored.
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