Marginal climate change abatement costs in Swiss dairy production considering farm heterogeneity and interaction effects

CONTEXT Climate change mitigation in the agricultural sector is a key policy goal. Marginal abatement cost curves allow comparing the cost-effectiveness of agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation measures. Existing studies often do not account for the heterogeneity of farms and interactions between mitigation measures. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to present a new approach that allows the calculation of a marginal abatement cost curve that considers farm level interaction effects of climate change mitigation measures. We assess the influence of farm structural heterogeneity on the greenhouse gas abatement potential and the corresponding abatement costs when measures are implemented jointly on the farm level. METHODS We use the bio-economic farm model FarmDyn to simulate farm-specific abatement potential and mitigation costs for a set of mixed dairy farms in a Swiss case study region (n = 66) and develop an approach to calculate a bottom-up, marginal abatement cost curve based on our sample of farms. Simulation results are used to identify and quantify the effect of heterogeneous farm structures (e.g., size, land use, etc.) on the interactions of climate change mitigation measures using regression analysis. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS In our study, interaction effects reduce marginal abatement costs by 7% and the overall greenhouse gas abatement potential by 3% compared to a stand-alone consideration of four climate change mitigation measures. Our analysis of how the underlying farm structures affect interaction effects between climate change mitigation measures shows that complex processes on the farm level can have ambiguous effects (i.e., increasing or decreasing greenhouse gas emissions). We conclude that our approach can provide important knowledge about how heterogeneity affects marginal abatement costs when mitigation measures interact with each other. SIGNIFICANCE Knowledge about the effectiveness and efficiency of climate change mitigation measures and their interaction effects improves our understanding and development of bottom-up marginal abatement cost curves, which represent an important and widely used tool to inform policymakers and stakeholders on cost-efficient and cost-effective climate change mitigation in agriculture.
Agricultural Systems, 207
ISSN:0308-521X