Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform aims at higher international trade compatibility and better targeting of social, environmental and consumer concerns to ensure the sustainable development of EU agriculture. To optimise the effectiveness and efficiency of CAP reform options towards multifunctionality implementations, tools are required to assess agricultural impacts on the multiple functions of European landscapes. The EU's Model of European Agriculture (MEA) has a multifunctional perspective but policy makers lack multifunctionality impact assessment tools. The proposed project develops such a tool, MEA-Scope, that will close the gap between pure ecological or social process models and sectoral macro-econometric or equilibrium models. To ensure compatibility with the MEA, an MEA-specific interpretation of multifunctionality will be devised. MEA-Scope will be spatially explicit and will perform impact assessments of agricultural land use at two scales: farm and landscape. This will be achieved by link three existing micro-economic models that simulate different aspects of farm structure, economics and environmental impact, so enabling joint- production to be predicted. Appropriate scope and detail will be ensured by simultaneous analyses of the regional demands for multiple landscape functions and of end user information needs. MEA-Scope will describe, analyse and evaluate the multifunctionality of agricultural production under a multitude of environmental, social and economic conditions. MEA-Scope will here be applied to one exemplary farming system (beef production) for 8 European landscapes including both, agriculturally benign and marginal land in accession countries and EU member states. Beef production is chosen because it is among the most adaptable systems with respect to (i) natural conditions and (ii) societal demands on land use functions. This will proof the MEA-Scope's capacity to assess joint production in different regions.
