According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), agriculture is responsible for about 11 % of total EU greenhouse gas emissions, and around 40% of EU land area is dedicated to farming. With the introduction of the New Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2023–2027, the European Union aims to make agriculture greener, fairer, and more responsive to environmental and climate challenges. A key component of this policy is the implementation of eco-schemes, which financially reward farmers who adopt sustainable and climate-smart practices. The PEOPLE4newCAP project supports this shift by using Earth Observation to monitor eco-scheme practices, helping farmers comply with environmental standards and supporting CAP's goals.

Source : EEA

The PEOPLE4newCAP project aims to demonstrate and validate Earth Observation (EO) and sensor-based monitoring systems to support the implementation of the EU’s NewCAP—especially eco-schemes—at both national and local scales. Coordinated by GISAT (CZ) with partners Wageningen Research (NL), Solenix Engineering (DE), and CleverFarm (CZ), the project focuses on the monitoring of key eco-scheme practices: crop rotation, fallow land management, extensive permanent grassland use, winter soil cover, catch crops, and crop water demand management.

The system leverages satellite EO data combined with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and geotagged photos to improve the quality and availability of reference data sets, thus enhancing the development and validation of automated monitoring methods. The project supports both farmers, by offering tools to assess their compliance with eco-schemes, and national paying agencies, by providing scalable monitoring approaches aligned with CAP reporting requirements.