Duration: 09/2019 – 02/2024

Summary: BESTMAP is an international research project run by a consortium of 13 partners across 7 countries and funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) supports the livelihood of 11 million farmers while maintaining environmental standards and good agricultural practices over half of the European Union (EU) land. Yet, pressures including land-use intensification, abandonment and climate change remain a challenge to the current CAP and its implementation.

The main goal of BESTMAP is to improve and contribute to the existing tools used in agricultural policy impact assessment, and to develop a new model-based approach to predict the environmental impact of changes in the CAP, in order to promote a sustainable future for the EU agricultural sector. To do this, BESTMAP will quantitatively model, monitor and map policy change impacts on the environment, climate system, delivery of ecosystem services, as well as socio-economic metrics. Moreover, BESTMAP will link economic modelling with individual-farm Agent-Based Models (ABM), to take into account the complexity of farmers’ decision making. This approach will be demonstrated in 5 case study regions across Europe covering diverse agricultural, socio-economic and political backgrounds, and later up-scaled to European-wide application. Overall, BESTMAP aims at improving the effectiveness of future EU rural policies’ design, monitoring and implementation.

Funding: BESTMAP receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 817501.

For more information about the project, check out the official webpage below.