Designing agri-environmental schemes to cope with uncertainty

Lapierre, Margaux; Velly, Gwenolé Le; Bougherara, Douadia; Préget, Raphaële; Sauquet, Alexandre

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107610

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…A further aspect of option value and therefore opportunity cost is captured by the attribute "contract flexibility" [83]. Contractual flexibility-in this case allowing pastoralists to suspend the contract conditions and associated payment once in every five consecutive years of contract duration-is an important feature of AES to enable farmers to cope with external uncertainty, in particular the occurrence of extreme weather events [86]. Contractual flexibility generates large utility and reduces the required payment by AUD 8.69 ha −1 a −1 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining Participation in and Supply of Private Land for Voluntary Conservation in Australia’s Tropical Savannas: A Discrete-Continuous Choice Experiment

Greiner¹

2023

Land

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Australia’s tropical savannas are a vast landscape of grasslands with high biodiversity value. Effective biodiversity conservation in this landscape requires private contributions to complement the under-sized formal conservation estate. The landscape is dominated by rangelands, in particular extensive cattle grazing on pastoral stations which typically measure hundreds or thousands of square kilometers. The paper reports the results of a discrete–continuous (or “two-stage”) choice experiment conducted with savanna pastoralists. A discrete choice experiment explored the stated willingness to participate in two long-term conservation strategies: (i) total exclusion of cattle from designated parcels of land with management of that land for biodiversity, and (ii) the implementation of rotational grazing systems governed by the requirements of biodiversity, among other contractual attributes. An extension question asked about the area that respondents were willing to supply and a contract they were willing to accept. Double-hurdle (type II tobit) modelling was used for combined data analysis. The results show that potential participation in voluntary conservation contracts by pastoralists is primarily influenced by contract attributes, namely, the conservation action required, the stewardship payment received, contract length and whether the contract contains flexibility provisions. Land productivity is also significant. The level of stewardship payment required to incentivize participation in the conservation of grasslands is in line with opportunity costs, in particular option value. The amount of land that pastoralists are willing to supply is determined by the conservation payment as well as farm size and intrinsic motivation. This research illustrates strategies for integrating biodiversity conservation into cattle grazing operations in Australia’s tropical savannas, which are applicable to grasslands globally. It provides data of an economic nature to inform the development of multi-tenure biodiversity conservation strategies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining Participation in and Supply of Private Land for Voluntary Conservation in Australia’s Tropical Savannas: A Discrete-Continuous Choice Experiment

Greiner¹

2023

Land

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“…Latent class models capture preference heterogeneity across segments (classes) of the population and assume uniform parameter estimates within the same class (Greene & Hensher, 2003). The probabilities of class membership are estimated for each individual based on socioeconomic covariates, such as age (Geussens et al., 2019; Kassahun & Jacobsen, 2015; Sardaro et al., 2016), education (Geussens et al., 2019; Van den Broeck et al., 2017), experience (Canessa et al., 2023; Houessionon et al., 2017; Ortega et al., 2016; Rakotonarivo et al., 2017), gender (Geussens et al., 2019), income (Broch & Vedel, 2012; Geussens et al., 2019), risk perception (Tyllianakis et al., 2023), farm characteristics such as farm size (Houessionon et al., 2017), land characteristics (Jaeck & Lifran, 2013), ownership (Broch & Vedel, 2012), soil and water quality (Chang et al., 2017; Raes et al., 2017; Zandersen et al., 2016), or organic farming status (Lapierre et al., 2023; Rocchi et al., 2017).…”

Section: Stated Preference‐based Evidence For Agri‐environmental Poli...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Using farmers' ex ante preferences to design agri‐environmental contracts: A systematic review

Schulze,

Zagórska,

Häfner

et al. 2023

J Agricultural Economics

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Ensuring that farmers' ex ante preferences are accounted for is crucial for the design of effective agri‐environmental contracts. We present a systematic review of 127 discrete choice experiment (DCE) studies of farmers' preferences with respect to agri‐environmental contracts. DCE studies evaluate two central features of farmers' behaviour: (1) their willingness to accept land use prescriptions, such as fertiliser use, application of pesticides, restrictions on cropping, livestock management, integration of silvopasture, maintaining soil health or water use restrictions; and (2) their responses to variations in incentive and commitment criteria, such as reward schemes, monitoring regimes, technical assistance, flexibility of agreements, administrative burden and collaborative implementation. Our analysis considers how these different elements are interlinked and applied in experiments to simulate farmers' decision‐making processes. We examine recent methodological improvements in explaining farmer behaviour, including the accommodation of preference heterogeneity, the combining of discrete (enrolment) and continuous decisions, and the incorporation of farmers' sense of identity. DCEs have been applied for the ex ante analysis of different policy instruments to inform the European Common Agricultural Policy and agri‐environmental schemes outside the EU. The results of this systematic review may be useful in informing the future design of such agri‐environmental programmes. The database underpinning this systematic literature review may help peer scientists to (a) compare, validate and triangulate their own findings with respect to other experimental approaches, (b) use previous willingness‐to‐accept (WTA) measures as priors for their own study design, and (c) identify research gaps regarding farmers' preferences for agri‐environmental measures.

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“…Farmers' uptake of sustainable agricultural practices in Europe has been mainly supported through financial incentives as compensation for additional costs and/or revenue foregone in the provision of ecosystem services (Bougherara et al, 2021;Lapierre et al, 2023). However, despite substantial agri-environmental payments to farmers over the years as part of the second pillar of the European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 1 , the uptake of sustainable agricultural practices has been suboptimal, often lagging behind expectations (Chèze et al, 2020;Dessart et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Often, it is assumed that farmers have perfect information about sustainable practices of interest, including the potential costs and benefits of applying the practices, which is not always the case (Chavas and Nauges, 2020). Yet, farmers' decisions partly relate to how they perceive the benefits and costs of applying alternative production practicesthat is, to their subjective beliefs about the practices (Chèze et al, 2020;Dessart et al, 2019;Lapierre et al, 2023). In this view, the limited uptake of more grass-based feeds may relate to information constraints about the environmental, social, and economic sustainability impacts of grass-based feeds, but whether this is the case remains an empirical question.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information provision and preferences for more sustainable dairy farming: Choice experimental evidence from Sweden

Oyinbo,

Hansson

2024

Agric. Resour. Econom. Rev.

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Dairy farming in Europe faces profound environmental, social, and economic sustainability challenges, which are of significant policy interest. These challenges support the need for a transition toward the uptake of more sustainable dairy farming practices. This paper examines the effects of an advisory instrument “balanced sustainability information” on farmers’ preferences for more grass-based feeding systems using a between-subjects design and a discrete choice experiment among a sample of Swedish dairy farmers. Conceptually, we develop a state-dependent utility framework with Bayesian updating to motivate the impact pathway. Our results demonstrate that on average, balanced sustainability information has negligible effects on farmers’ feed choices, which could be a consequence of opposing responses to the information, among others. Considering farmer heterogeneity based on their identities and prior knowledge, we find support for some evidence of treatment effects. Our findings highlight important and policy-relevant critical reflections about overoptimistic expectations of information provision as an instrument to nudge behavioral change toward more sustainable farming practices.

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Designing agri-environmental schemes to cope with uncertainty

Cited by 6 publications

References 66 publications

Examining Participation in and Supply of Private Land for Voluntary Conservation in Australia’s Tropical Savannas: A Discrete-Continuous Choice Experiment

Examining Participation in and Supply of Private Land for Voluntary Conservation in Australia’s Tropical Savannas: A Discrete-Continuous Choice Experiment

Using farmers' ex ante preferences to design agri‐environmental contracts: A systematic review

Information provision and preferences for more sustainable dairy farming: Choice experimental evidence from Sweden

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