Foreword
Agriculture is facing a key challenge in reducing its impact on the environment, including preserving vital natural resources such as soil and water. For more than 20 years, the OECD has been tracking the agriculture sector’s environmental impact, collecting information against more than 60 agri-environmental indicators (AEIs) in its member countries. Over time, this geographical coverage has expanded to include Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, the People’s Republic of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Indonesia, India, Kazakhstan, Malta, the Philippines, Romania, Russian Federation, South Africa, Ukraine, and Viet Nam.
This report updates the data published in the 2015 OECD Compendium of Agri-environmental Indicators to present a summary of the environmental performance of agriculture in OECD countries as of end-2015. The report also includes new and innovative material to further strengthen its relevance as a reference document. In particular, the four thematic chapters each cover a targeted set of indicators for which data coverage is generally more consistent across time in OECD countries and that capture the main pressures agriculture exerts on the environment. Chapter 1 focuses on the interlinked issues of land use, pesticides and farmland birds; Chapter 2 covers ammonia and greenhouse gas emissions, the main air pollutants from agricultural activities; Chapter 3 is dedicated to nitrogen and phosphorus balances, two indicators that signal air and water pollution; and Chapter 4 focuses on water use and irrigation.
In addition to summarising the main trends in these selected AEIs, each chapter also identifies the main drivers of the observed trends based, for Chapters 1 to 3, on econometric analyses using the OECD AEIs.
The report recognises the difficulties in developing a comparative set of agri-environmental indicators given that methodologies to measure indicators are not well established in all cases and may differ across countries. National-level data can conceal significant ranges, reflecting local site-specific values, and year-to-year variations in the value of indicators may reflect weather variability. To minimise these problems, the report focuses on long-term trends and supports the findings with empirical evidence from the literature.
Finally, all chapters discuss country cases and distil policy lessons on how to improve the environmental performance of the agriculture sector.
This report was declassified by the OECD Joint Working Party on Agriculture and the Environment (JWPAE), of the OECD Committee for Agriculture and the OECD Environment Policy Committee.