Farm-level environmental performance assessment in Hungary using the Green-point system

Abstract

Faced with society's increasing expectations, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy uses environmental management as an increasingly critical criterion in the allocation of farm subsidies, with a shift in focus from production and area-based subsidies to payments for supplying public goods. There is an increasing demand to assess the ecological and environmental performance of farms as public money spent on provision of environmental services requires justifi cation. The objective of this research is to strengthen the basis of the concept of farm-level environmental performance assessment. Firstly we give an overview of indicator-based sustainability assessment tools. Even though there are several diff erent tools developed globally, and the themes and indicators for the assessment of environmental performance are very similar, there are signifi cant diff erences in terms of data survey among them. Secondly we describe the development and fi eld testing of the 'Green-point system' developed in Hungary. This system is able to measure the environmental performance of farms and their value/ capability of providing public goods and sustaining ecosystem services through a framework of farm enterprise calculations and assessments. The Green-point system fi ts well into the stream of yet scarce approaches and eff orts, which in several European countries aim to introduce and strengthen the so-called result-based agri-environmental schemes alongside the currently rather dominant management-based approaches.

Farm outcomes based on cluster analysis of compound farm evaluation

“…A sizeable number of original works examine the non-production functions of agriculture with a focus on defining environmental and social benefits, on determining their value (Thomassen et al 2009;Mészáros et al 2015), and on examining the effect of agriculture on certain selected areas (Van der Werf et al 2009). Numerous studies into agriculture and into environmental protection in relation to agriculture use multidimensional methods to incorporate findings obtained in various other fields (Dolman et al 2012).…”

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“…political, economic, social), methods of achieving their goals, and methods of measuring them. The individual dimensions that influence the overall ranking were derived from theoretical findings in the literature (EC 1999;Renting et al 2009;Dolman et al 2012;Mészáros et al 2015).…”

“…where: MA -production dimension; MB -economic dimension; MC -financial stability dimension; MD -environmental dimension; ME -social & other dimension, w -weight used for dimensions A (production), B (economic), C (financial stability), D (environmental) and E (social & other); i -number of indicators (1, 2, 3, … n). Meul et al 2008;OECD 2008;Wrzaszcz 2014;Mészáros et al 2015) and expert selection. Production dimension indicators evaluate the intensity of a farm's production capabilities.…”