D10.1: Carbon farming policy assessment

Summary

EU agriculture both contributes to climate change (around 11% of EU GHG emissions) and is highly affected by it, while also offering major mitigation and co‑benefits through approaches such as organic farming. The report analyses EU policy mixes supporting “organic climate farming” across climate mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity, and enabling frameworks, finding that policies are fragmented, insufficiently ambitious, and poorly integrated in practice. It concludes that organic farming’s system-level benefits are structurally undervalued, with rigid additionality rules, high transaction costs, and legal uncertainty discouraging farmers and limiting uptake at scale.