From a review of the Sustainability Assessment in Agriculture with indicators to the presentation of IDEA method as an operational tool for implementing a sustainable Common Agriculture Policy

International audience; The agreement on the Health Check of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP, 2008) is a key step towards a more sustainable agriculture. Henceforth, member states shall be authorized to transfer a part of the direct payments from conventional agriculture to different types of agriculture more sustainable. The difficulty for Member States is now to give a concrete meaning of this concept which has also to be accepted by European Commission and farmers too. That is why, in France, the scientific community is asked by authorities to evaluate the ability of existing farm sustainability methods to assess farming systems in an operational way. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the French method called IDEA (Indicateurs de Durabilité des Exploitations Agricoles or Farm Sustainability Indicators) should support the implementation of this new challenge. After briefly going back to the main economic measures promoting sustainable agriculture, we present from a large state of the art, (1) a synthesis of the sustainable agriculture concept and (2) results on main features of farm sustainability assessment methods developed since 1990. Among all of them, the scientific approach of the IDEA method is developed and then illustrated by tests of the IDEA method on French case studies. The last part is dedicated to the presentation of two recently emerged opportunities regarding the use of the IDEA method. The first opportunity concerns the application of the IDEA method on a national scale. We focus on the capacity of this method, developed on a farm level, to be used on an aggregated level (the national one) with data issuing from national agricultural data surveys. The second opportunity is related to the use of two systemic IDEA indicators (economic efficiency / rate of ecological infrastructures in the cultivated area) to be integrated into official rules for certifying a High Environmental Value agriculture.