H2020 EFFECT Project: Environmental Public Goods from Agriculture to Effective Contractual Targeting

European agricultural areas provide important and valuable commodities in the form of food, fiber, and biomass to the world. They are also crucial for the supply of a range of environmental and climate goods and services. EU Member States have implemented agri-environment schemes, investment subsidies for environmental technologies, and private actors have established environmental certification and labeling schemes targeting these services. However, many initiatives are arguably not cost-effective in boosting the provision of environmental and climate services; they may be biased in terms of distributional impacts, increase risks for farmers, or entail excessive transaction costs. EFFECT will develop and test a theoretically well-grounded and empirically well-tailored package of new contractual frameworks. This will enable farmers to reconcile agricultural production with improved delivery of environmental and climate public goods and services for the benefit of wider society. EFFECT pursues this through a transdisciplinary effort involving a review of past successes and failures; and the development and testing of new forms of contracts.

We combine knowledge of agricultural and environmental sciences with theoretical and empirical insights from law, political science, and economics. Furthermore, we combine the efforts of researchers and multiple practice partners and stakeholders to ensure that lessons learned from previous initiatives and our testing of emerging contractual frameworks are validated on the ground. Our ambition, which builds on the consortium's solid experience, is to facilitate the implementation of our jointly developed agri-environmental contractual arrangements by the end of the project.

Furthermore, to ensure the project's lasting impact, EFFECT initiates a trans-European innovation process, supports capacity building among decision-making bodies, and develops a policy evaluation framework.