National Agri-Environmental Health Analysis and Reporting Program (NAHARP)

One of the goals of the Agricultural Policy Framework (APF) is to position Canada as the world leader in environmentally responsible production while improving air, water and soil quality and conserving biodiversity. To help ensure the agriculture industry is on the correct path to achieving this goal, and to help determine the impact policies and programs have on the environment, the Government of Canada established the National Agri-Environmental Health Analysis and Reporting Program (NAHARP).

More than ever, achieving environmental sustainability in agriculture has become a pressing and complex challenge. In some sectors, environmental concerns pose a direct constraint to growth, and could increasingly affect the agricultural industry's ability to serve existing international markets, and to compete for new ones.

To manage these concerns effectively, it is important to first understand the pressures and opportunities that exist in terms of environmental sustainability. In 1993, in response to the need for agri-environmental information and to assess the impacts of agricultural policies on the environment, AAFC began developing a set of agri-environmental indicators (AEIs) to determine how environmental conditions within agriculture were changing over time, and how such changes could be explained.

Results of this work were published in February 2000 in a report called Environmental Sustainability of Canadian Agriculture: Report of the Agri-Environmental Indicator Project (2000).

Further to this initial work, and in light of current and future needs for this kind of information, AAFC decided to strengthen its capacity to develop and continuously improve on AEIs, as well as the tools that use these indicators to develop policy and programs. AAFC is establishing this capacity through NAHARP.