They select as most urgent objectives the provision of healthy food with minimal impact on the environment, a reduced reliance on subsidies, an increased efficiency in using natural resources, and pursuing climate change adaptation and resilience. Following their compelling advise - fully aligned with the F2F Strategy - the H2020 MIND STEP consortium is developing a set of relevant policy scenarios to be modelled.
MIND STEP takes as starting point the individual decision-making actors in the agricultural sector and their diverse biophysical and economic contexts. Including individual decision-making in agricultural modelling is crucial to get a more realistic estimation of the impact of policy scenarios and their expected environmental and climate objectives.
This addition will therefore advance a broad range of the agricultural models used in MIND STEP – including the ‘big ’ones used for the impact assessment of the Common Agricultural Policy-, and make it possible to account for the diversity in farm characteristics and behavior, such as the adoption of new practices. Find below an illustration of MIND STEP research questions that are relevant for F2F:
- What policy scenarios and technological concepts encourage individual farmers to actively invest in greenhouse gas emission reduction and in carbon sequestration, thus perceiving farmers as part of the solution rather than the problem?
- Which farming practices are available and where can they be effective?
- What would be a farmer’s willingness to engage in such agriculture funding schemes?
- What would be the impact of a carbon tax on some agricultural production?
- How efficient would be to establish an emission trading system between farmers?
The preliminary answers to these questions will be available in September 2022.