Do the agri-environmental policies alter sustainability of rural landscapes?

Landscape means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors (Article 1 definitions, European Landscape Convention, Firenze 20.X.2000). The definition is clear and nowadays well accepted. Trickier is to progress in the sense of identifying landscape quality objectives, as also demanded in the Convention, and which should depend on the public demand of these landscapes, i.e. their cultural and amenity values. New EU policies focusing on the development of Europe's rural areas, including its broad variation of landscapes, and specially the New European Model of Agriculture, which stresses the territorial role of agriculture, increases the need to better understand how these different landscapes are valuated by people, and how farming may contribute to so-called landscape quality. Indeed, people do value landscape patterns, elements, and their combinations (Dramstad et al 2006). They are also able to express their preferences for certain landscape patterns, but there are still challenges to assess these preferences taking care of the diversity and complexity of the landscape (Alkomany 1999), and to combine these preferences with the increasing number of models assessing how policy options can modify the chain "on-farm modifications > agricultural land use changes > landscape pattern > adequacy to people needs and expectations" and reversely how human expectations can be considered in the design of specific policy options can be coordinated with each other. This paper aims to describe a landscape amenities evaluation tool that aims at filling this gap. This tool is based on the identification of an optimum range of landscape composition, defined through a survey assessment to user groups or expert panels, and its relation, through selected indicators, to the landscape composition resulting from different scenarios.