The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the main instrument of the European Union for shaping farming systems and rural landscapes. It faces the dual challenge of maintaining agricultural competitiveness and incomes, while addressing urgent ecological crises. With the 2027 deadline of the Water Framework Directive approaching and the new Nature Restoration Regulation mandating large-scale ecosystem recovery, the CAP’s role in safeguarding rivers, wetlands, and catchments has become critical. This Policy Working Paper argues that long-term agricultural resilience is inseparable from healthy freshwater ecosystems and illustrates how water restoration can be embedded in future agricultural policies to enhance water resilience. 

Why Healthy Rivers and Wetlands Matter

Functioning rivers, wetlands, and floodplains provide essential ecosystem services, from flood protection and groundwater recharge to biodiversity support and recreational opportunities. Agriculture is both a driver of their degradation – through drainage, pollution, and habitat loss – and highly dependent on their services for soil fertility, climate adaptation, and yield stability. Even modest restoration can deliver significant benefits for society, such as reductions in flood damage from reactivated floodplains, and water-resilient farming practices at plot, farm, and catchment levels not only sustain agricultural productivity but also underpin the resilience of wider societies and economies.

Current CAP Architecture and Limitations 

The 2023–2027 CAP introduced the “Green Architecture” combining mandatory conditionality (GAEC), eco-schemes, agri-environment-climate interventions (ENVCLIM), and investment (INVEST) measures. While these instruments have the potential to support a variety of more sustainable farming practices, implementation often falls short due to weak conditionality, limited uptake of transformative measures, wide disparities between Member States, and a lack of strategic coherence in the CAP’s design.

Key Recommendations for Reform 

The brief identifies several priorities for aligning the CAP with freshwater restoration: maintain and strengthen conditionality requirements on CAP payments; ringfence sufficient funds for ecological objectives; avoid harmful subsidies that exacerbate water stress; and move from short-term compensatory payments toward performance-based incentives and long-term investment frameworks. Market-based mechanisms, such as certification or payment for ecosystem services, should complement public funding to reward farmers who deliver measurable ecosystem benefits. Crucially, cooperation at catchment and landscape scale must be incentivized, with monitoring systems upgraded to track real ecological outcomes rather than administrative compliance.

Future Directions

The future CAP must move beyond treating water merely as a resource input for farming and instead recognize freshwater ecosystems as the ecological foundation of European agriculture. Achieving resilience in food systems, rural livelihoods, and environmental health requires systemic policy design that integrates farm, catchment, and landscape perspectives. Only through a systemic understanding coupled with a strategic approach to aligning policy instruments, the CAP can secure both the long-term resilience of farming and the restoration of Europe’s rivers and wetlands.