Evaluating IRENA indicator "Risk of Farmland Abandonment" on a low spatial scale level: The case of Galicia (Spain)

The IRENA operation is part of the efforts of the European Commission to monitor the environmental effects of the Common Agricultural Policy. A reform of the original IRENA Agri-Environmental Indicators was proposed in 2006, when an indicator on the risk of farmland abandonment was introduced. A report on the proposed use of this indicator at scale of the whole European Union was first issued in 2013, but no empirical data has been used to far to evaluate its performance. This paper presents an exercise in which most of the variables proposed in the indicator were calculated at municipal scale for a Spanish region in 1989 and then compared with land use changes that took place until 2009. Results showed the indicator to be globally meaningful and revealed differences in the relative importance of the variables included in it, which might be partially attributed to the disparity between the scale of administrative units used in this paper and the one originally intended for the indicator, and partly to the specificity of the our study area. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.