The CONSOLE project focuses on promoting agriculture and forestry delivery of public Agri-Environmental-Climate Goods (hereafter AECPG) through the development of improved contractual solutions.

The difficulty in the provision of public goods relates to the main challenges, such as trade-offs between environmental performance and farm profitability, time lag between action and impact, and potential mismatch between scales of action and its effects.

Agricultural policy in the European Union (EU) has partially reoriented its objective towards the provision of public goods in rural areas, recognizing current social demands. Also, the legislative proposal for the next CAP programming period envisages following this path.

CONSOLE project and the provision of public goods

However, the actions aimed at the delivery of AECPG are still considered unsatisfactory in terms of longevity, effectiveness and efficiency.

Improvements may come from a flexible combination of promising new instruments, such as land tenure systems, results-based payments or collective approaches, as well as better value chain strategies, but have so far been tried badly in practice in the EU.

An effective implementation of these solutions requires a consistent multi-level contractual framework that takes into account the surrounding context variables, such as the union with market goods, price systems, business networks, social capital, the experience of farmers and EU / national / local framework legislation.

Also, it must take into account the social, organizational and technological innovation processes, as well as the local specificities of the desired results. Finally, feasibility may depend on broader implications of different approaches, e.g. green box compliance and budget constraints.

As a comprehensive, innovative and collaborative approach is needed to ensure a systematic update of the provision of AECPG in Europe, CONSOLE boost its innovation in the durable delivery of AECPG by EU agriculture and forestry, by creating a Community of Practice (CoP), designing and testing effective and efficient cooperation models and developing a contractual framework to support the implementation by multiple actors.

The main expected output of the CONSOLE project is a framework to better design and implement AECPG contracts, built in conjunction with a ready CoP capable of applying the framework in a real-life context.