There can be no analysis without data. In this spirit, researchers have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions.
The researchers have used two examples to demonstrate how this can be done: how a country's economic development is linked to its adoption of agri-environmental policies and how such policies impact soil erosion.
In their work, the team focused on measures that meet certain criteria:"First and foremost, the measure has to be relevant in some way to agriculture, such as land use, nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides. But forest conservation is included too, because it's linked to agriculture in many countries," explains Wuepper, who is also a member of the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn.