Enhancing SEA's effectiveness: spatial analysis of agri-environmental measures in the SEA of Rural Development Programs

In this paper we present an SEA case-study applied to a Rural Development Program (RDP), which allocates resources to support agri-environmental schemes to pay farmers for the provision of environmental services. In particular, the paper examines the use of spatially explicit assessment methods. Results show that the spatial distribution of some key environmental measures is not always the best performing one in environmental terms, based on a series of spatially explicit environmental indexes. Spatial analysis thus represents a useful tool to provide input to decision-makers, especially when dealing with complex instruments like RDP, entailing a variety of objectives, stakeholders, beneficiaries and environmental aspects to be considered.