A Spatial Typography of Environmentally Friendly Common Agricultural Policy Support Relevant to European Green Deal Objectives

The European Union (EU), through its implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), is increasingly emphasising the development of environmentally friendly forms of agriculture. This is confirmed by, for example, the new European Green Deal (EGD). In Poland, the most important forms of CAP support for the environmentally friendly management of agricultural land were the following measures: agri-environment-climate measures (AECM) and organic farming (OF). These aid instruments facilitated the use of a range of packages and variants, which resulted in the pro-environmental forms of support offered by the CAP support having a very diverse internal structure. This study therefore attempts to synthesise the diversity of CAP financial support using spatial typology methods. The researched support measures were divided into three basic directions for developing agriculture: ecology, environment and habitat. The research procedure involved the D'Hondt method, the normalisation method, standardisation and correlation. The study was conducted on the example of Poland, and the basic territorial unit of analysis was the commune. It was shown that support for environmentally friendly activities in Poland related to almost 10% of the total farm area. The utilised agricultural area (UAA) covered by subsidies can be broken down as follows: organic farming-32.7%, environmental farming-31.8%, habitat farming-35.5%. The detailed results of the typology indicate the complexity of the spatial distribution of environmentally friendly CAP funds, which is defined by environmental determinants and the characteristics of the farms themselves. Farm-specific, non-environmental determinants were found to be the most significant, including farm size and managerial expertise.