A common path for restoring EU agricultural ecosystems: The Nature Restoration Regulation at the crossroads with the Common Agricultural Policy.

This article examines the relationship between the EU Regulation on Nature Restoration and the EU Common Agricultural Policy in the restoration of EU agricultural ecosystems. It asks whether the CAP, in its current and emerging post2027 configuration, can operate as a credible delivery framework for the Nature Restoration Regulation’s agricultural restoration objectives, or whether its prevailing financial and governance architecture risks reproducing the very pressures that restoration law seeks to reverse. The article argues that the main challenge is not the absence of formal synergies between the two instruments, but the asymmetry between a binding restoration mandate and an agricultural support system that remains largely organised around area-based payments, insufficient socio-ecological parameters, and voluntary instruments often designed or implemented in ways that preserve existing intensive production models and national status quo rather than steering a genuine environmental transition. In this context, the article first situates the Nature Restoration Regulation against the limits of the EU nature conservation framework in agricultural landscapes, where site-based protection and preventive duties have proved insufficient to address diffuse, cumulative and agricultural landscape-scale pressures. It then examines the green delivery model of the CAP 2023-2027, focusing on CAP Strategic Plans, conditionality, eco-schemes, rural development measures, coupled support and distributional inequalities. The article subsequently analyses the Regulation’s agricultural provisions, particularly Article 11, the role of National Restoration Plans, the emergency clause in Article 27, and the coordination provisions linking restoration planning with CAP instruments. It concludes that agri-ecosystem restoration will remain fragile unless the post-2027 CAP internalises restoration as a core criterion of agricultural support through stronger ecological baselines, result-oriented indicators, landscape-scale incentives, interoperable monitoring systems and a reallocation of environmentally harmful or weakly conditioned support towards restoration-oriented measures.