Evaluation of environment and climate architecture
This Thematic Working Group will provide guidance to Managing Authorities and evaluators on how to assess the CAP's environment and climate architecture at Member State level.
In their CAP Strategic Plans (CSPs), Member States have opted for a wide range of interventions and other instruments to address the CAP's environmental and climate objectives, e.g. Specific Objective (SO) 4 for climate action, SO5 to safeguard natural resources and SO6 to protect biodiversity. This combination of baseline requirements (e.g. GAECs) and interventions, such as eco-schemes, agri-environmental and climate measures (AECM), and investment support (as well as other interventions designed to address SO4, SO5 and SO6) is referred to as environment and climate architecture i.e. green architecture.
The design of and financial allocation to green architecture instruments is different in each Member State and depends on an assessment of needs. The synthesis report of the ex ante evaluations post 2020 highlights many difficulties Member States faced when designing their green architecture, particularly with the coherence among different CSP instruments contributing to SO4, SO5 and SO6, as well as with external instruments aiming to achieve the same environmental and climate objectives.
Objectives
The main objective of this Thematic Working Group is to provide guidance for Managing Authorities and evaluators on how to assess the performance of green architecture at Member State level in relation to:
- Coherence: how to assess the interplay between (i) the instruments forming the green architecture, (ii) the other instruments of the CSPs, and (iii) the green architecture instruments with instruments external to the CSPs.
- Effectiveness: how to assess the overall contribution from the environmental and climate architecture towards SO4, SO5 and SO6 and a comparison with the previous programming period.
- Efficiency: how to assess if the design of the green architecture is as simple as possible while keeping the environmental and climate benefits.
The outcome of the Thematic Working Group will take the form of guidance.
Working process
This Thematic Working Group runs from March to December 2025 and is structured as follows:
- Working Package 1 - Launching of the Thematic Working Group, encompassing preparatory activities and the facilitation of a kick-off meeting.
- Working Package 2 - Coordination of content development. This involves understanding the environment and climate architecture, development of the guidance and a stakeholder consultation.
Working Package 3 - Finalisation and quality control of the guidance.
Organisation
The Thematic Working Group is set up by the EU CAP Network supported by the European Evaluation Helpdesk for the CAP. Participation in the Thematic Working Group is by invitation only and its members include evaluation experts and European Commission staff.
As part of the Thematic Working Group, a sounding board consultation will be organised to provide written feedback on the draft version of the guidance. Participants may include Member State representatives in charge of evaluating CSPs, Paying Agency representatives, evaluators and other relevant experts.
For any questions, please contact the Evaluation Helpdesk at evaluation@eucapnetwork.eu.
