China is now the world's biggest annual emitter of greenhouse gases with 7467 million tons (Mt) carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2005, with agriculture accounting for 11% of this total. As elsewhere, agricultural emissions mitigation policy in China faces a range of challenges due to the...

Developing the capacity to assess and chart trends in the sustainability of farming and food production is becoming increasingly more important as agriculture strives to produce more food while minimising the risk to the natural environment. The multi-faceted nature of sustainability is...

Employing a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Spanish economy, this study explicitly aims to characterise the potential impact of Kyoto and European Union environmental policy targets on specific agricultural activities up to 2020. The model code is modified to...

One of the key features of the CAP 2014 reforms is the requirement for Member States currently distributing direct payments to farmers on the basis of historic support levels to switch an area-based payment scheme. This paper explores effects of this shift for both the farm sector and the wider...

Carbon sequestration in agricultural soils is considered as an option of greenhouse gas mitigation in many countries. But, the economic potential is limited by the dynamic process of saturation and the opportunity cost of land use change. In addition, this article shows that permanence cannot,...

Recent extreme weather events have resulted in an ongoing discussion on the issues of land use and compensation payments within Austrian agriculture. Building on a functional evaluation system for agricultural lands as developed within the Interreg IIIB project “ILUP”, the national project...

Results from a pilot application of Defra’s segmentation model applied to the Farm Business Survey for England are presented. Interviews with 750 FBS co-operators during 2010, using a discursive approach, classified co-operators into one of five segmentation groups: Custodians (14.0%);...

This paper considers the cost of greenhouse gas mitigation potential of legume crops in French arable systems. We construct marginal abatement cost curves to represent this mitigation or abatement potential for each department of France and provide a spatial representation of its extent. Despite...

This paper addresses the challenge of developing a ‘bottom-up’ marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) for greenhouse gas emissions from UK agriculture. A MACC illustrates the costs of specific crop, soil, and livestock abatement measures against a ‘‘business as usual’’ scenario. The...