The OSCAR (Optimal Strategies for Climate change Action in Rural areas) software was developed for the European Commission (DG CLIMA, Ref: CLIMA.A.2/SER/2011/0025) in 2012-2013 to support the optimal design of climate change policies through the EU's rural development policy. The software includes tools to: identify of hotspots within a region with respect to GHG emissions and adaptation; calculate and assess impacts on Mitigation (GHG emissions and carbon sequestration), Adaptation (adaptive capacity of ecosystem services) and Productivity (agricultural and land use production) by RDP operations within specific regions. This includes calculating net GHG emissions over different time horizons (1 to 250 years) in order to highlight the time period required to realise net benefits (or burdens), which can be particularly important for carbon sequestration impacts; compare selected RDP measures and operations with respect to mitigation, adaptation and production performance within a specified region. The performance of the operations can be ranked using the Mitigation, Adaptation and Productivity (MAP) criteria, thus providing a means for optimisation (e.g. identifying those operations in a region which have potential benefits for mitigation, adaptation and production and/or identifying those where there are trade-offs between the MAP criteria); and assess the cost-benefit of RDP measures and operations, including the production of Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC) curves for mitigation and marginal adaptation costs curves for adaptation. MAC curves can be derived rapidly using data from the Production Impact Assessment (PID) or users can input economic data for each operation in their region should such data be available.