Using the Ecological Focus Area (EFA) calculator to assess the potential impact of EFA implementation on biodiversity and ecosystem services

This study is a first attempt to use the EFA (Ecological Focus Area) calculator as a tool to support an assessment of policy impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the EFA implementation at European level. Based on a literature review, the EFA calculator has been developed by the University of Hertfordshire, with the coordination of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), as a farm-level tool with the scope of raising farmers' awareness about the implementation of EFA and providing guidance and direction to farmers with regard to EFA selection and management. In this study, the tool was used to calculate potential impacts at NUTS3 level using the data on EFA implementation in 2015 notified by the Member States. The tool is run with aggregated data at NUTS3 level: this use implies that the region is populated by an average farm, and context data used to run the calculator are average regional data on soils, climate, etc. Some specific attributes and practices linked to the EFA elements (e.g. floral diversity, landscape connectivity, hedges cutting season, etc.) and used to fine-tune the EFA calculator scores, could not be taken into account. These assumptions and constraints should be considered in the analysis of the results obtained. The scores calculated for each NUTS3 region represent potential impacts generated by average regional data, and are not based on specific characteristics, management practices and landscape conditions of a real farm. Therefore these scores should not be considered as absolute values of the actual impact of EFA implementation on the environment, but they can be used as a proxy to represent the potential impact on the environment of the EFA type composition that was declared in the NUTS3 region.