Authors: Peter Witzke and Guna Salputra (EuroCARE)
Editor: Raquel Pastor (AEIDL)
Quantitative tools play a key role in integrating sustainability goals and economic, environmental, and social targets into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Strategic Plans (CSP) of Member States. The latest Tools4CAP report, “Exploring Innovative Quantitative Tools”, led by EuroCARE, provides a detailed analysis of various modelling tools and their potential to enhance policy formulation, implementation, and monitoring. By offering practical resources, these tools empower policymakers and national managing authorities to optimise efforts and make evidence-based decisions. Moreover, these tools strengthen monitoring and tracking capacities.
Relevance of quantitative tools in agricultural policy analysis
Quantitative models such as CAPRI (Common Agricultural Policy Regionalized Impact), GLOBIOM (Global Biosphere Management Model), and AGMEMOD (Agricultural Member State Modelling) play a key role in analysing agricultural policies, assessing environmental impacts, and forecasting economic projections at the EU level. However, their use at the national level remains limited, creating opportunities for innovation in decision-making support.
These tools can assist national authorities in evaluating policy decisions, optimising resources, and addressing global challenges such as climate change, food security, and land-use management. However, developing and maintaining such models requires both technical and financial support. To address this, regional collaboration is encouraged, enabling the joint development of modelling tools. In addition, technical training, knowledge exchange, and capacity building activities —such as those offered in the Tools4CAP Academy — can contribute to improving the applicability and use of these tools.
The team behind this report, EuroCare, applied an evaluation-based methodology to identify gaps in existing models, propose adaptations, tailor tools to specific case studies in Member States, and explore innovative approaches to address uncovered gaps. Furthermore, they examined how different modelling approaches can complement one another to enhance analytical capacity.
Main findings from the assessment
Some conclusions drawn from this work are related to the economic sphere, where farm-level models provide good coverage of agricultural income, but face challenges in integrating risk management strategies. Furthermore, farmers’ position in value chains is only partially covered, with ongoing efforts to model organic output and forward pricing. Findings related to environmental indicators have also been identified, where progress has been made in covering climate mitigation measures. However, there are still gaps in modelling renewable energy, soil management, and biodiversity indicators, which require better data integration and enhance modelling capabilities. Lastly, in the social and rural domains, tackling structural change, rural poverty and job growth remains challenging due to the lack of relevant sectoral data.
To summarise, these findings underscore the importance of continuous innovation in quantitative tools to meet the evolving needs of CAP governance and sustainability goals.
More information: D2.2 Report on exploring innovative quantitative tools