Rebecca Evans welcomes world-leading Glastir evaluation

Deputy Minister for Farming and Food, Rebecca Evans, today attended the launch of the innovative new Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Portal at the Royal Welsh Show.

This new scheme works to combat climate change, improve water quality and soil management, mitigate flood risks and maintain and enhance biodiversity within ecosystems. The portal monitors the impacts of the scheme to ensure that it complies with the European Commission Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, and that it demonstrates value for money for taxpayers.

Deputy Minister Rebecca Evans said,

“Glastir continues to be one of the cornerstones of Welsh Government Rural Communities – our new Rural Development Programme. It is a major investment in our natural resources and farm businesses, and it is vital that we gather strong reliable evidence to monitor the effectiveness of the scheme as well as ensure we get value for money.”

By using a number of different techniques to analyse and predict the long term impacts, as well as identifying failures early on, the Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme enables more effective evaluation and reporting on the Glastir scheme.

The Deputy Minister said,

“This programme has been identified at a UK, European, and International level as being at the forefront of the ecosystem approach to evidence capture and scheme evaluation.

“The scale and scope of the Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme demonstrates my commitment to gathering robust evidence and is an example of how the Welsh Government places evidence at the heart of policy design and delivery.

“I am particularly pleased to see it being led by a Wales-based institution, having a strong representation from other Welsh organisations, and involving the voluntary and private sector. This excellent and highly regarded work helps promote the academic and research capabilities of Wales to a wider audience internationally.”

The Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme works with different stakeholder groups to form links between the monitoring of data, provision of environmental services and benefits to these various groups.

All data, analysis and reports will be made available through a Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme web portal to be launched soon.

The portal will make accessing all reports, evidence and information extremely easy and open to all. In addition the portal will have an interactive facility allowing visitors to ask questions of the data in real time.