BrightSpace’s WP4 held an online meeting on 17 September 2025, bringing together partners to discuss progress on evaluating the impacts of EU and international policies on the Safe and Just Operating Space (SJOS) of European food systems. WP4, led by UCSC, focuses on assessing how EU policies — including the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), trade agreements, and environmental and climate regulations — affect sustainability and resilience in the EU agri-food sector.
The meeting centered on updates for Deliverable 4.2, due by the end of April 2026, and explored how WP4 outputs can feed into project pilars 2 and 3: large-scale models used to simulate policy scenarios. Participants shared progress on multiple analyses, including:
- CAP tools: Evaluating agri-environmental schemes, organic farming, low-input agriculture, greening payments, and first pillar payments using machine learning, multicrop models, and remote sensing data.
- Trade policies: Investigating non-tariff measures (NTMs), trade patterns, and sustainability standards, with a focus on the impacts on soybean trade flows, pesticide residues, and regulatory cooperation.
- Environmental and climate policies: Assessing climate-related payment schemes, fertilization restrictions, and crop choice effects at both farm and territorial levels.
The meeting also highlighted WP4’s role in synthesizing results across tasks to provide a global judgement on policy impacts on SJOS indicators for agriculture. Contributions from WP4 will inform broader project activities, supporting evidence-based policy design across organic farming, agri-environmental schemes, trade standards, and climate-related interventions.
WP4’s analyses aim to identify how policy instruments — ranging from direct payments to market-based measures— affect farm-level practices, environmental outcomes, and structural changes in the EU agri-food system. These insights will ultimately feed into BrightSpace’s broader effort to design sustainable SJOS strategies for EU agriculture.
