CLIM-FAS

The project’s main objectives are to (1) provide robust estimates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the agricultural industry under current and future climatic conditions, accounting for spatial variability, farm heterogeneity, and diversity in agricultural practices; (2) critically assess certain policies and legislation that focus on GHG emissions and carbon sinks; and (3) design and propose innovative strategies that can be directly deployed by policymakers and stakeholders.

More specifically, CLIM-FAS will complete the following tasks:

• Inventory measures for reducing GHG emissions and maintaining or increasing carbon sinks; next, estimate their ecoefficiency, paying particular attention to the mitigation potential of carbon farming measures and practices
• Examine the psychological and socioeconomic drivers of and barriers to the adoption of existing mitigation measures, accounting for issues of permanence, additionality, leakage, and uncertainty, as well as the costs of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV)
• Assess the mitigation potential of French crop and livestock farms in the presence and absence of mitigation measures; estimate their marginal cost of abatement
• Evaluate the economic and regulatory effectiveness of certain policies and pieces of legislation that focus on GHG emissions and carbon sinks (ex-post analysis), specifically programmes supporting agricultural practices that sequester and store carbon in soils, as well as the instruments of France's recently approved National Strategic Plan as part of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy
• Design new regulatory and policy-based mechanisms to promote mitigation measures and better protect agricultural soils, given their role as carbon sinks, and also provide proof of their effectiveness (ex-ante analysis); these mechanisms may include public- and private-sector funding, as well as regulatory measures (e.g., directives) and economic measures (e.g., subsidies, certification programmes, standards, taxation schemes)
• Improve understanding of how farmer behaviour is affected by psychological factors (e.g., concern about climate change, attitudes, abilities, climate representations) and socioeconomic factors (e.g., household composition, level of education)
• Provide policymakers with evidence and policy-relevant information arising from the latest available data, reliable methods, databases, and decision-making tools so that they can carry out comprehensive assessments of climate change mitigation options

CLIM-FAS will tackle these challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective, bringing together researchers in the agricultural sciences, soil sciences, social psychology, economics, and law, and will deploy up-to-date methodologies in the field of public policy evaluation, including econometrics, bioeconomic modelling, and experimental economics. CLIM-FAS will strive to gather all the data needed to conduct a rigorous quantitative analysis, including data from France’s network for agricultural accounting information (RICA), which comprehensively represents farm heterogeneity in terms of resource availability, performance, and socioeconomic structure.