https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190801142546.htm

Agricultural areas cover 174 million hectares, or 40 percent of the EU area (over 50 percent in Germany). Land use intensification, primarily by agriculture, is identified by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as the number one cause of biodiversity loss, with risk to human wellbeing resulting from losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The European Union, and thus also Germany, has committed in various international agreements to shift toward sustainable agriculture, the protection of biodiversity, and combatting climate change. With approx. 40 percent of the total budget, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the most important policy areas for implementing these international commitments. "The proposal made by the European Commission for the CAP post-2020, published in June 2018, demonstrates very little of this intention," says a research team led by Dr Guy Pe'er (iDiv, UFZ) and Dr Sebastian Lakner (University of Göttingen).