Water retention and protection measures: a framework to assess socio-economic performance of farm-level solutions

Climate change projections suggest that many European regions will experience more frequent extreme events such as droughts, heavy rainfall and increasing winter precipitation. These conditions are expected to aggravate the conflicts between different water users, affect watershed management and create additional challenges for agriculture, which is thus asked to play a key role in contrasting these effects. At the farm level, the multifunctional nature of the so-called Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRMs) ensures multiple commitments to agricultural production, environment conservation and water protection, while contributing to achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals, environmental targets formulated in several EU regulations and the Common Agricultural Policy. Despite the recognized benefits of such techniques to increase water retention at farm-level, new knowledge on these topics is also needed. Given the variability of economic-related aspects between NWRMs, across scales, soil-climatic regions, agricultural systems, farming types and climate scenarios, relevant literature still does not offer any unique or harmonized approach and framework to assess their socio-economic performance. The study at hand stems from the EU H2020 project OPTAIN and aspires to fill literature gaps and provide a common, cross-case and cross-measure synoptic framework of socio-economic performance indicators (SPIs), suitable to characterize and qualitatively assess the different NWRMs that can be implemented at individual agricultural holdings.