Ecological impacts of Greening versus Agri-Environmental and Climate Measures (AECM): An ecological-economic evaluation for Lower Saxony, Germany

The introduction of Greening and the ecological focus area (EFA) due to the CAP-reform 2013 has introduced a new agri-environmental instrument into the CAPs first pillar, aside of the established agri-environmental and climate measures (AECM) within the second pillar. This introduction poses the questions, to what extent both instruments are collaborating to achieve positive environmental outcome. The paper presents an economic-ecological method to evaluate both EFA and AECM measures evaluation on arable land with respect to biodiversity. We investigate the effectiveness and efficiency and the spatial impact of EFA and AECM using the approximation method of the ecology score, which is based on an ecological ex-ante evaluation. The results show that EFA has taken a large area within Lower Saxony mainly with catch crops. The AECM has reduced it’s are from 2012 to 2016, however, increased its respective funds, which suggests a trend for more ‘dark green’ AECM. The spatial analysis shows that EFA achieves effects mainly in arable regions of Eastern Lower Saxony. Both measures show rather low coherence, only on 15.4% of the land we find synergetic effects of both measures. The funds per ecology score suggests, that EFA has a lower efficiency (596 EUR/ES) in comparison to AECM (307 EUR/ES)