The 181st EAAE seminar in Berlin on “Greenhous gas emissions in the EU agriculture and food sector – potential limits of climate mitigation policies and pricing instruments” has been an opportunity to share the state of play on the three projects of the Agrimodel cluster and to assess future possible interactions and synergies.
With just under a year to go for the Agricore, Bestmap and Mind-step projects, a lot of work has been done and first preliminary results were showed and compared at the preconference in Berlin.
Bestmap aims at estimating the farmers’ “Willingness to Accept” agri-environmental measures. The research work, carried out through questionnaires simulating the possibility of signing contracts in 5 countries (EU and non-EU), allowed the collection of farms’ detailed socio-structural information and the estimate of the WTA through “choice experiment” method. Preliminary results showed strong heterogeneity in agents’ adoption behaviour with some common elements including preferences for simple contracts with low implementation costs. Sharing the obtained results, on the WTA and applied technologies, will be of great added value to the other cluster projects.
Mind-Step is characterized by integrating the results obtained using different established models that run simulations at different levels: individual farm (Farmdyn), interaction between farms (Agropolis), European market (CAPRI), and the entire planet (Globim). The presentation at the pre-conference focused on the common agricultural policy scenarios implemented, that could be shared with the cluster projects, and on how to interact with stakeholders in the results dissemination phase through a common factsheet.
Agricore develops a suite that includes a regional Agent Based Model integrated with a data set index tool, a synthetic population generator, a land and product market module, a biophysical module and specific impact assessment modules. In particular, the presentation focused on the ABM simulation, which foresees recursive iterations between a long-term module, based on Model Predictive Control, and a short-term module, based on Positive Mathematical Programming. For Agricore, collaboration with the other cluster projects is two folded: on the model side, the AGRICORE ABM can enrich the ability to represent productive and social farms interactions simulations in complex market and agri-environmental policy scenarios considering the specificities of various European regions; on the stakeholder’s communication side, implementing common market and policy scenarios, as well as through common ways to present the final results.
The meeting was very constructive, it served as platform for the consortium’s members to identify possible collaboration and interaction among projects, and it allowed a deeper understanding of the issues typically faced while developing and simulating agricultural policies at different scales.
On 26 and 27 of October, an online workshop, on modelling individual decisions to support the European policies related to agricultural, is organized by Mind Step and another face-to-face meeting will be planned in March, in preparation of the EAAE 2023 conference in Rennes, where the projects results will be presented.
