Impacts of cross compliance measures on environmental indicators : an assessment tool to evaluate environmental impacts at the European scale

The EU cross-compliance (CC) instrument implies that farmers receive payments subject to meeting Statutory Management Requirements (SMRs) related to environment, food safety, animal and plant health and animal welfare, as well as standards of good agricultural and environmental conditions (GAECs). This report describes the approach and application methodology of an environmental impact tool to evaluate cross compliance measures on environmental effect indicators. It consists of a selection of the effect indicators to be applied and assessment tools to be used with a review of the CC measures to be evaluated in assessing the environmental impacts. Furthermore, it includes an evaluation of CC measures related to the Nitrates Directive and selected GAECs with the coupled CAPRI-MITERRA model for the prototype of the environmental impact tool.