Conference Agenda

Organic farming reduces the environmental impacts of agriculture. As part of the EU Green Deal, the Farm-to-Fork (F2F) strategy aims at achieving 25% of total utilized agricultural land being organic by 2030. Each Member State has allocated a budget and designed organic conversion measures as part of their CAP Strategic Plans. It is still unclear what the best approach for organic conversion is to ensure the 25% target is reached, while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture as much as possible and protecting food security. To better understand how the outcomes of a result-oriented conversion policy would compare with action-oriented ones, this paper assesses contrasting hypothetical organic conversion policy strategies for the EU, including one focused on environmental performance. The results show the converted area, GHG emissions reduction and impacts on production for each scenario. In all cases, the converted area is not enough to reach the 25% target due to the budget limit. The analysis also suggest that the combination of the current F2F Strategy target (area-based) with environmental-related objectives would be desirable, so the environmental benefits of the policy are maximized.

Climate change deems the use of carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDRs), such as soil carbon sequestration in agriculture. However, there are significant challenges with implementing sequestration policies due to the trade-off between climate benefits and high abatement and transaction costs. The purpose of this study is to investigate how transaction costs affect the economics of carbon sequestration. We develop a model of the optimal adoption of cover crops as a carbon enhancing practice, and empirically apply it using Denmark as a case study. Our findings indicate that, in the presence of transaction costs and at a carbon price of 220 €/tCO2, additional cover crops can only offset 15.4 tCO2 per year in the country. This could contribute only to 0.002% of the agricultural emissions reduction target. The results are sensitive to the carbon price that applies. We find total costs for cover cropping ranging from 60.6 to 284.4 €/ha, including both abatement and transaction costs. The latter represents on average 60.5% of the total costs. Assuming zero transaction costs overestimates the resulting sequestration, by 13.03 thousand tCO2 per year.

attle production is considered as a significant sources of ghg-emissions and the demand for dairy products is growing globally. In conjunction with the reduction targets in ghg-emissions, milk needs to be produced with lower carbon intensity. In Europe, the low carbon intensity has been achieved with a cost of various water quality problems associated typically with high animal densities. Our study compares the cost-effectiveness of afforestation of organic fields with other measures typically available on European dairy farms. We develop a non-linear optimization model which considers both the ghg- and water emissions. Reforestation of fields is costly in particular if losing the existing subsidies is included as a cost. The social optimum for the dairy farm is characterized by afforestation of almost all peat soils.

Little is known about the effect of extreme temperatures on dietary behaviour. Using exogenous daily variations in weather and a nationally representative consumer panel in the U.S., we highlight that extreme heat significantly increases the volume purchased of sugary drinks while not impacting diet drinks. We explore a range of potential drivers, including inter-temporal shifts, psychological biases, retailers' price adjustments, inter-channel substitutions, and changes in shopping habits, with limited explanatory power. We find the effect to be driven by rural and lower-income households. Being employed in an outdoor occupation also appears associated with higher extreme heat impacts on consumption. We show limited long-run adaptation to climate with historical heat exposure. Applying these results to climate predictions up to 2100, we estimate the distributional impact on future sugary drink intake. Amidst the current obesity epidemic, our findings participate in informing policymaking to promote healthier diets under climate change.