Search

We examine the abatement costs for water and climate pollutants and their respective policies while accounting for cobenefits. We construct private and social marginal cost curves for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and nutrient runoff in Finnish agriculture. We find that the social marginal costs of reducing emissions that reflect the cobenefits are lower than the private costs. Accounting for greenhouse gas cobenefits from nutrient load reduction or water cobenefits from climate emissions reduction creates a gap between privately and socially optimal reduction levels. This gap varies depending on the valuation of cobenefits. The cost-efficient reduction of the focus pollutant is increased when cobenefits from the other pollutant are accounted for. For policies, this implies a higher cap or tax on the focus pollutant. We decompose the optimal tax rate to a basic tax on the focus pollutant and on an additional tax component depending on the level of cobenefits. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-019-01257-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Baltic Sea is considered the marine water body most severely affected by eutrophication within Europe. Due to its limited water exchange nutrients have a particularly long residence time in the sea. While several studies have analysed the costs of reducing current nutrient emissions, the costs for remediating legacy nutrient loads of past emissions remain unknown. Although the Baltic Sea is a comparatively well-monitored region, current data and knowledge is insufficient to provide a sound quantification of legacy nutrient loads and much less their abatement costs. A first rough estimation of agricultural legacy nutrient loads yields an accumulation of 0.5–4.0 Mt N and 0.3–1.2 Mt P in the Baltic Sea and 0.4–0.5 Mt P in agricultural soils within the catchment. The costs for removing or immobilising this amount of nutrients via deep water oxygenation, mussel farming and soil gypsum amendment are in the range of few tens to over 100 billion . These preliminary results are meant as a basis for future studies and show that while requiring serious commitment to funding and implementation, remediating agricultural legacy loads is not infeasible and may even provide economic benefits to local communities in the long run.

Climate change represents a serious threat to life in earth. Agriculture releases significant emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), but also offers low-cost opportunities to mitigate GHG emissions. This paper assesses agricultural GHG emissions in Aragon, one important and representative region for agriculture in Spain. The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) approach is used to analyze the abatement potential and cost-efficiency of mitigation measures under several scenarios, with and without taking into account the interaction among measures and their transaction costs. The assessment identifies the environmental and economic outcomes of different combinations of measures, including crop, livestock and forest measures. Some of these measures are win-win, with pollution abatement at negative costs to farmers. Moreover, we develop future mitigation scenarios for agriculture toward the year 2050. Results highlight the trade-offs and synergies between the economic and environmental outcomes of mitigation measures. The biophysical processes underlying mitigation efforts are assessed taking into account the significant effects of interactions between measures. Interactions reduce the abatement potential and worsen the cost-efficiency of measures. The inclusion of transaction costs provides a better ranking of measures and a more accurate estimation of implementation costs. The scenario analysis shows how the combinations of measures could reduce emissions by up to 75% and promote sustainable agriculture in the future.

Natura 2000 areas are designated according to the EU's Birds and Habitats Directives in order to protect particular habitats and species. A variety of these habitats and species are particularly sensitive to deposition of nitrogen caused by ammonia emissions. Livestock farming is the primary source of this pollution. The purpose of this paper is to compare the costs of reaching the ammonia emission targets for different livestock farms near Natura 2000 sites in the Netherlands, Germany (Schleswig-Holstein), and Denmark. These countries have some of the highest NH 3 deposition rates in Europe, and Germany in particular will have to implement new measures to reach the NEC requirements for 2030. This will also benefit nature sites in Denmark as a large share of the ammonia emissions is dispersed over long distances. The general regulation includes implementation of BAT technologies and emission ceilings. The analysis looks at regulatory aspects, the emission requirements and the cost of implementing the technologies to reduce emissions further. The selected case farms are a finisher farm and a dairy farm, and the distance to a Natura 2000 site is 400 and 2000 m. In all three countries, relatively few livestock farms are situated near or inside Natura 2000 areas. The regulatory approach is very different in the three countries and key issues are: additional deposition from projects, neighbouring livestock farms (cumulation), the inclusion of background deposition and the use of the critical loads concept. The Dutch PAS system is interesting as projected reductions in emissions are distributed as additional “room for development” today. The costs for the case farm with finishers in Schleswig-Holstein are the highest as the Filter Decree requires the use of air scrubbers. The findings suggest that farms 400 m from a Natura 2000 site in the Netherlands face lower and less costly constraints than in the other countries, whereas the opposite is the case for farms 2000 m from Natura 2000 sites. The requirements near Natura 2000, where strict requirements apply, are so high that farms will expand at a different site instead.

We examine how nutrient load compensation could help a firm expand its production when production is a source of nutrient loads, threatening the ecological status of a water body. We ask whether compensation is technically feasible and whether it can be made in an ecologically sustainable way. Credits for compensation may be provided by point or nonpoint sources. We apply our approach to the case of Finnish Lake Kallavesi, where the Supreme Administrative Court, based on the Water Framework Directive, refused an environmental permit for a plan to build a large pulp mill. We employ a lake nutrient response model to determine water quality using probabilistic analysis of the ecological status of the lake. The supply potential of phosphorus credits from point sources was too low to keep the lake in good ecological status with at least 80% probability and must be complemented by credits from agricultural nonpoint sources. Using a trade ratio of 1:1.2 to reflect uncertainty on credits from nonpoint sources suggests that the reduction in agricultural phosphorus loading would suffice on its own to ensure the good ecological status by 90% probability. The cost of buying nutrient reduction credits would be at most 2% of the investment.

This study proposes the use of marginal abatement cost curves to calculate environmental damages of agricultural systems in China's Loess Plateau. Total system costs and revenues, management characteristics and pollution attributes are imputed into a directional output distance function, which is then used to determine shadow prices and abatement cost curves for soil and nitrogen loss. Marginal abatement costs curves are an effective way to compare economic and conservation tradeoffs when field-specific data are scarce. The results show that sustainable agricultural practices can balance soil conservation and agricultural production; land need not be retired, as is current policy. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

In this paper we reflect on the challenge of reallocating water resources from agricultural interests to environmental uses. The area of interest is the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia, although the evidence presented provides salient lessons for a range of settings. We draw on the transaction cost literature where the tasks of re-designing and using institutions can help conceptualise the costs associated with policy change. A framework for improving ex ante assessment of transaction costs and its relationship to transformation or abatement costs is elaborated, especially as it relates to community consultation exercises. Against the background of the water reforms of the past three decades we conclude that policy makers and administrators could limit increases in transformation costs and contain transaction costs by giving greater attention to the form of community consultation, by taking account of the sources of uncertainty that attend policy choices and recognising the potential for consultation fatigue. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This text reviews the assessments of marginal abatement costs of methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture. We use agricultural emissions and the corresponding prices collected from 21 studies that have assessed abatement potentials and costs using various modeling approaches and assumptions. We first highlight the implications of the modeling approach for marginal abatement costs. Harmonized abatement rates for three emission prices (10, 20 and 50 €2005/tCO2eq) are regressed on variables that reflect various modeling assumptions and study characteristics. In a second step, the emission price is introduced as an explanatory variable. When controlling for a few key characteristics of the studies, the models explain an important share of the observed variability in abatement rates. The type of modeling approach is found to have a significant effect. In particular, we find that equilibrium models lead to higher abatement rates for a given price. The flexibility in nitrogen use and its effect on crop yields also plays a significant role in lowering marginal abatement costs. The results of the second step indicate that the price elasticity of the abatement rate is about 0.6. This estimate is found to be robust to several specifications and consistent with previous assessments covering other economic sectors.; Dans cet article, les auteurs menent une revue quantifiée de la littérature qui évalue les coûts marginaux de réduction des émissions de méthane (CH4) et de protoxyde d’azote (N2O) d’origine agricole. Ils utilisent les données collectées dans 21 études qui ont évalué le potentiel de réduction des émissions et les coûts d’abattements associés en utilisant différentes approches et hypothèses de modélisation. Dans un premier temps, les auteurs soulignent l’influence de la modélisation. Ils régressent des taux d’abattement, harmonisés pour trois prix associés aux émissions (10, 20 et 50 €2005/tCO2eq), sur des variables reflétant les hypothèses de modélisation et les caractéristiques des études. Dans un deuxième temps, les auteurs introduisent le prix associé aux émissions comme variable explicative. Lorsqu'ils contrôlent, pour les caractéristiques des études, les estimations expliquent une part importante de la variabilité observée dans les taux de réduction des émissions. Le type de modélisation a un effet significatif sur le taux de réduction des émissions. En particulier, les auteurs nous montrent que les modèles d’équilibre conduisent à des taux de réduction des émissions plus élevés pour un prix donné. La prise en compte de la flexibilité dans l’utilisation d’intrants azotés et de leurs effets sur les rendements tend à diminuer significativement les coûts marginaux d’abattement. Les résultats de la seconde étape indiquent que l’élasticité-prix du taux d’abattement est d’environ 0.6. Cette estimation est robuste à plusieurs spécifications économétriques. Elle est également cohérente avec des estimations récentes couvrant d’autres secteurs économiques.

In this paper, we compare many of the widely available estimated global benefits of abatement with the costs to Irish agriculture, as estimated by the CAPRI model. We apply the model to Ireland only, in a simple comparative static simulation, and assume fixed prices. We focus more on methane reduction than GWP reduction as a whole, because most of the discussion regarding global warming from agriculture in Ireland has focused on methane. Our results suggest that the costs of methane abatement to the farming sector do indeed outweigh the global benefits, except in the case of very small methane abatements. However, if one also factors in the gains to society of the FEOGA budget rebates, then all losses disappear, and in fact net financial gains occur. We conclude that this may have implications for the design of methane reduction policies. peer-reviewed

This paper examines the relative contribution of AF activities in an emission reduction program, focusing in part on the relative desirability of sequestration in forests and agricultural soils. The analysis will consider the effects of competition for land and other resources between AF activities and traditional production. In addition, analysis is done on the influence of saturation and volatility.