Search results

AbstractMarkets in pollution permits for managing environmental quality have been advocated by economists since early 1970s as a mechanism that can deliver pollution reduction targets at lower cost to regulated entities than traditional uniform command-and control approaches. This study explores whether a 'smart market' cap-and-trade scheme between non-point sources can offer meaningful, robust and policy amenable, advantages over alternative approaches for nitrogen management in a realistic setting: 6504 individual farms in Limfjorden catchment, Denmark. The scheme involves multilateral trading of nitrogen emission rights among farms via changes in agricultural land management practices under a catchment-level cap on total nitrogen load. In this, the first exploration of non-point to non-point smart market nitrogen trading in a real setting, we estimate efficiency gains compared to uniform command-and-control regulation, explore the robustness of these gains in the face of non-participation, and reflect on farmers' potential acceptance of the trading market in comparison with its command-and-control analog: spatially-targeted regulation, implemented via location-specific limits on nitrogen leaching. Results indicate that the smart market has the potential to substantially reduce the cost of meeting the catchment's nitrogen reduction target. For a 21.5% reduction from baseline nitrogen load, the market delivers cost savings of 56% (DKK273 million, €36.6 million) compared to uniform regulation, with participating farms realising a mean net benefit of DKK 723/ha (€ 97/ha). Market performance is relatively robust against transaction cost; when delivering a 21.5% reduction in nitrogen load to Limfjorden, approximately 70% of the overall efficiency gain could be retained if only 24% of farms engaged with the market.

Over 40% of the earth's land surface are drylands that are home to approximately 2.5 billion people. Livelihood sustainability in drylands is threatened by a complex and interrelated range of social, economic, political, and environmental changes that present significant challenges to researchers, policy makers, and, above all, rural land users. Dynamic ecological and environmental change models suggest that climate change induced drought events may push dryland systems to cross biophysical thresholds, causing a long-term drop in agricultural productivity. Therefore, research is needed to explore how development strategies and other socioeconomic changes help livelihoods become more resilient and robust at a time of growing climatic risk and uncertainty. As a result, the overarching goal of this special feature is to conduct a structured comparison of how livelihood systems in different dryland regions are affected by drought, thereby making methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to our understanding of how these types of social-ecological systems may be vulnerable to climate change. In introducing these issues, the purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview of the two main intellectual challenges of this work, namely: (1) how to conceptualize vulnerability to climate change in coupled social-ecological systems; and (2) the methodological challenges of anticipating trends in vulnerability in dynamic environments.

It is well-recognised that to achieve long-term sustainable and resilient land management we need to understand the coupled dynamics of social and ecological systems. Land use change scenarios will often aim to understand (i) the behaviours of land management, influenced by direct and indirect drivers, (ii) the resulting changes in land use and (iii) the environmental implications of these changes. While the literature in this field is extensive, approaches to parameterise coupled systems through integration of empirical social science based models and ecology based models still need further development. We propose an approach to land use dynamics modelling based on the integration of behavioural models derived from choice experiments and spatially explicit systems dynamics modelling. This involves the specification of a choice model to parameterise land use behaviour and the integration with a spatial habitat succession model. We test this approach in an upland socio-ecological system in the United Kingdom. We conduct a choice experiment with land managers in the Peak District National Park. The elicited preferences form the basis for a behavioural model, which is integrated with a habitat succession model to predict the landscape level vegetation impacts. The integrated model allows us to create projections of how land use may change in the future under different environmental and policy scenarios, and the impact this may have on landscape vegetation patterns. We illustrate this by showing future projection of landscape changes related to hypothetical changes to EU level agricultural management incentives. The advantages of this approach are (i) the approach takes into account potential environmental and management feedbacks, an aspect often ignored in choice modelling, (ii) the behavioural rules are revealed from actual and hypothetical choice data, which allow the research to test the empirical evidence for various determinants of choice, (iii) the behavioural choice models generate probabilities of ...

The impact of climate change on agriculture depends on the environmental and socio-economic contexts in which the changes occur. However, current tools to anticipate climate change impacts focus almost entirely on biological and environmental processes. For example, most large-scale crop models can identify where yields are sensitive to new temperatures and CO2 concentrations but do not include any socio-economic factors that may enable (or inhibit) farmers' abilities to adapt. To address this gap, this paper uses national scale socio-economic, meteorological and agricultural data to identify socio-economic factors that have made rice, maize and wheat production resilient and sensitive to past droughts. Results suggest that cereal harvests in countries undergoing economic and political transition are most vulnerable to droughts and that factors related to investments in the agriculture sector (such as the amount of fertilizer used by farmers or the amount of Gross Domestic Product produced by a nation's agricultural sector) help reduce vulnerability. While results are limited by data quality and availability, this study provides preliminary quantitative insights that highlight important areas for further research on the socio-economic factors that create vulnerability to climate change.

AbstractEconomic experiments have emerged as a powerful tool for agricultural policy evaluations. In this perspective, we argue that involving stakeholders in the design of economic experiments is critical to satisfy mandates for evidence‐based policies and encourage policymakers' usage of experimental results. To identify advantages and disadvantages of involving stakeholders when designing experiments, we synthesize observations from six experiments in Europe and North America. In these experiments, the primary advantage was the ability to learn within realistic decision environments and thus make relevant policy recommendations. Disadvantages include complicated implementation and constraints on treatment design. We compile 12 recommendations for researchers.

We compared and contrasted 11 European case studies to identify challenges and opportunities toward the operationalization of marine and coastal ecosystem service (MCES) assessments in Europe. This work is the output of a panel convened by the Marine Working Group of the Ecosystem Services Partnership in September 2016. The MCES assessments were used to (1) address multiple policy objectives simultaneously, (2) interpret EU-wide policies to smaller scales and (3) inform local decision-making. Most of the studies did inform decision makers, but only in a few cases, the outputs were applied or informed decision-making. Significant limitations among the 11 assessments were the absence of shared understanding of the ES concept, data and knowledge gaps, difficulties in accounting for marine social-ecological systems complexity and partial stakeholder involvement. The findings of the expert panel call for continuous involvement of MCES 'end users', integrated knowledge on marine social-ecological systems, defining thresholds to MCES use and raising awareness to the general public. Such improvements at the intersection of science, policy and practice are essential starting points toward building a stronger science foundation supporting management of European marine ecosystems. © 2017 The Author(s).