**1. Introduction**

Implementing sustainable agricultural development requires a compromise between agricultural producers, who mainly aim to maximise outputs, and societal interests, among which care for the environment is growing in importance. Under the conditions of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), this is leading to a redefinition of the concept of agriculture, from the typical production approach to the holistic, sustainable and rational managemen<sup>t</sup> of natural resources that are considered to be public goods subject to special protection [1,2].

This approach prioritises climate change mitigation, making the maintenance of extensive and biodiverse agricultural systems more important than the production (market) outputs of agriculture [3,4]. This justifies the expenditure of EU funds to support environmentally friendly activities in agriculture [5–7]. However, some studies to date have indicated that the current mechanism of EU payments in this area does not always guarantee that the assumed environmentally friendly changes will happen [8,9].

**Citation:** Rudnicki, R.; Wi´sniewski, Ł.; Biczkowski, M. A Spatial Typography of Environmentally Friendly Common Agricultural Policy Support Relevant to European Green Deal Objectives. *Land* **2021**, *10*, 1092. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10101092

Academic Editor: Cezary Kowalczyk

Received: 27 September 2021 Accepted: 12 October 2021 Published: 15 October 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

The issue of sustainable agriculture development also occupied an important place in the European Commission's communication on the European Green Deal (EGD) published in December 2019—a new growth strategy that aims to transform the EU into a just, prosperous society, living in a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy [10]. Implementing this plan will require that several green challenges be tackled (e.g., achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050) to modernise the social and economic systems of Member States [11].

Particularly large changes will be required in agriculture, as evidenced by the future CAP's premise that as much as 40% of total funds will be allocated to supporting climaterelated goals [12]. In this respect, it is of key importance to implement the "Farm to Fork" strategy, which assumes, among other aspects, particularly strong support for areas used for organic farming, such that, by 2030, they constitute 25% of the agricultural land area [13–15]. This percentage compared to the area of organic farms in Poland and their small share in the total utilised agricultural area (about 3.0%) necessitates major scientific work (including spatial studies of agriculture). This indicates the need to develop a new, environmentally friendly model of agriculture that increasingly makes agriculture a sphere for producing environmental public goods [16,17].

It is assumed that implementing the EGD will be a major impetus for the development of Polish agriculture, which is distinguished by its predominance of small family farms (averaging c. 10 ha) and agricultural production that is often extensively used and preserves biodiversity [18].

The authors agree with Pe're et al. [19] that it is necessary to search for new, more appropriate tools that can reliably assess initiatives undertaken to rationally manage natural resources in the agricultural sector [20]. The typology drawn up in this work (using an appropriate methodology) is part of the search for and development of appropriate instruments for assessing the implementation of environmentally friendly CAP measures.

Two CAP instruments implemented in Poland under the Rural Development Programme for 2014-20 (RDP 2014-20), i.e., the agri-environment–climate measure (AECM) and organic farming (OF), were adopted as the basis for this targeted research. They are a continuation of similar payments being implemented since Poland's accession to the EU, i.e., the years 2004-06 and 2007-13. Their formal and legal characteristics are detailed in the relevant ordinances of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development [21,22]. The above green measures are part of the trend towards sustainable development, as they contribute to promoting practices designed to protect: soil; water and climate; valuable natural habitats and endangered species of birds; landscape diversity; and endangered genetic resources of crops and animals [23]. They constitute an important financial instrument for encouraging farmers to apply practices leading to the greening of agricultural production. Farmers receive financial resources as remuneration for undertaking specific actions in support of the natural environment as compensation for any potential loss in income in transitioning from intensive to extensive farming [24,25]. The analysed RDP instruments encourage farmers to act to protect the environment and biodiversity and to preserve the landscape, thereby raising their environmental awareness.

Because AECM and OF goals have not been universally achieved—especially within the scope discussed in this article—further research is needed to answer difficult questions. This applies both to the search for optimal solutions based on a catalogue of good agricultural practices and to scientific evidence. Farmer et al. [26] noted that research is needed that addresses the spatial correlation between the implementation of the agri-environment– climate measure (AECM; including organic farming) and environmental indicators at large spatial scales, to elucidate the impact of Agri-environmental payments on ecological targets. This points to a current research gap in the assessment of the rationality of spending CAP funds on green forms of agriculture, especially in the context of the natural predispositions of a given area. In connection with the above, the authors propose to extend the traditional spatial analysis of farmland covered by CAP payments (concerning individual measures, packages, variants) with a synthetic approach based on a tripartite division, involving

support for three basic types of agriculture: ecological, environmental and habitat. This division is the basis for the spatial typology developed by the authors, which aims to systematise the various types of support offered under the CAP.

The main objective of the present research is to spatially delimit the selected types of environmentally friendly subsidies and to assess them in terms of the impact of environmental conditions and selected agricultural characteristics. This targeted analysis is also a preliminary part of wider research that aims to identify the mechanism shaping the spatial distribution of land covered by environmentally friendly CAP subsidies, which is the basis for inferring how to potentially increase their share in the total area of agricultural land, in line with the premises of the EGD.

### **2. Materials and Methods**

### *2.1. Scope and Data*

The study is limited to two measures of RDP 2014-20, namely AECM and OF, which were spatially analysed based on their total coverage of nearly 1.285 million hectares of utilised agricultural area (UAA). These comprise a complex system of pro-environmental payments covering seven basic categories (packages) and including 40 various forms of paymen<sup>t</sup> (variants, schemes; see Appendix A).

To simplify this complex system in a way that reflected the specifics of the individual measures (packages), the subsidised UAA areas were expertly divided by the type of agriculture supported, i.e.,


The proposed division approximates the level of greening of farming, which results from the requirements that the packages impose on farmers. The intensity of activities is reflected in the subsidy rates, the highest being for organic farming and the lowest for the sustainable agriculture package.

The determined spatial systems were assessed using a range of diagnostic attributes aggregated into two groups of conditions: environmental determinants and agricultural characteristics. On this basis, we attempted to answer the question: does a tract of farmland's coverage by pro-environmental payments result from its environmental conditions or from the nature of the agricultural activity?

The study covers the territory of Poland, according to its system of 16 provinces (tabular presentation) subdivided into a total of 2477 communities (Pol. *gmina*) (cartographic presentation). Spatial analysis was based on the 2282 communities in which there was land subsidised by the various green measures (in 195 communities, no financial support from these measures was recorded).

The timeframe related to the CAP 2014-20 financial framework. Given that proenvironmental payments and commitments are long-term in nature (generally 5 years), the analysis was based on long-term average areas of subsidised land (AECM—2015-20; OF—2017-20).

The source material used comprised public data from the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland (LDB)(Pol. *BDL GUS*) in Warsaw (PSR 2010) and the Institute of Soil Science and Plant (Pol. *IUNiG*) in Puławy (for environmental conditions) and data provided by the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARMA)—the disburser of CAP funds in Poland.
