The Potential of SEA in Fostering European Agriculture Policy and Strategies—Challenges and Opportunities

Agriculture presents one of the central global pressures on biodiversity and climate. In the EU, the Green Deal, the Farm to Fork, and the Biodiversity Strategy 2030 set ambitious environmental targets, acknowledging the key role of agriculture for their achievement. It is, therefore, crucial to integrate such targets in the European Commission’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP 2023–2027 will be implemented through the national CAP Strategic Plans, subject to Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). This presents an unprecedented opportunity to steer agriculture towards sustainability. This paper aims to elaborate the role of SEA in CAP Strategic Plans by identifying the links between the strategies mentioned above and SEA, learnings from previous SEA experience in Rural development programs, and collecting experts and stakeholders’ views on the topic. We maintain that SEA of CAP Plans should adopt a strategic approach rather than an impact-based one. Relying on the Critical Decision Factors, we exemplify how this approach can be applied to the key objective of reducing mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides. We show how SEA could be pivotal in this regard and identify three enabling Critical Decision Factors: knowledge transfer, governance, and the need to bring industries into the forum.