Agriculture plays a critical role in shaping environmental outcomes — from greenhouse gas emissions to water use and biodiversity. The OECD dashboard of agri-environmental indicators provides a comprehensive overview of how agricultural performance is evolving across countries and over time.
Agriculture and environment
Ecosystem services, such as pollination, soil fertility, and climate regulation, are critical in supporting productive agricultural systems. Agricultural practices can impact these services negatively, through pollution and degradation of soil, water and air resources; or positively, when sustainable farming practices are adopted. The OECD monitors and analyses the linkages between agriculture and the environment to identify trends on this issue and support the design of adequate policy responses.
[NEW] Measuring the environmental footprint of agriculture
Key messages
To help countries improve the sustainability of agriculture, the OECD has developed recommendations on how to develop cost-effective agri-environmental policies, how to manage water issues for agriculture, how to deal with climate change challenges, and how to preserve biodiversity and manage ecosystem services related to agriculture. The OECD has also developed insights on the potential environmental impacts of agriculture policies by identifying possible policy misalignments and how to jointly address sustainability and productivity growth goals.
While there is unlikely to be a “one-size-fits-all” solution for dealing with environmental concerns in agriculture because agro-ecological conditions and public preferences differ across countries, OECD data and analysis provides to policy makers a deeper understanding of, and capacity to measure, the linkages between policies and outcomes in order to evaluate and achieve better environmental outcomes in a cost-effective manner.
Addressing the challenges of ensuring food production for a growing population while improving environmental performance requires increasing the environmental and resource productivity of agriculture, enhancing land management practices, minimising pollution discharge, curtailing damage to biodiversity, and strengthening policies that avoid the use of production and input subsidies harmful to the environment.
The majority of OECD countries have reformed their support policies to increase the share of payments decoupled from production or input use. In addition, many have made direct payments conditional on compliance with environmental regulations and established new agri-environmental payment schemes. OECD evidence indicates that these measures contribute to improved environmental outcomes, in terms of reduced nutrient pollution and improvements in farmland biodiversity.
Context
OECD agri-environmental indicators provide a unique overview of the state of the environment in agriculture across a broad range of countries
To monitor and evaluate agriculture's environmental performance, the OECD developed a database of agri-environmental indicators (AEIs). The OECD AEI database brings together data from 1990 to the present on 62 indicators (classified into 11 broad themes) for all OECD countries, plus Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Indonesia, India, Kazakhstan, Malta, the Philippines, Romania, Russian Federation, South Africa, Ukraine and Viet Nam.
The AEI database can be used to:
provide a snapshot of the current state and trends of environmental conditions in agriculture that may require policy responses;
highlight where new environmental challenges are emerging;
compare trends in performance across time and between countries, especially to assist policy makers in meeting environmental targets, threshold levels and standards where they have been established by governments or international agreements;
monitor and evaluate agriculture policies; and
project future trends.
The AEIs are freely available to access and download – explore a specific theme or country below.
How has the environmental performance of agriculture evolved over the last 30 years?
Environmental sustainability remains an important challenge for agriculture. A new OECD report on the environmental performance of agriculture identifies key trends, highlights areas of progress, and identifies persistent challenges.
