Economic Incentives to Improve Water Quality in Agricultural Landscapes: Some New Variations on Old Ideas

Factors Influencing Farmers’ Adoption of Best Management Practices: A Review and Synthesis

“…Generally, water quality issues associated with agricultural runoff are the biggest concern. Numerous studies in the Midwest (Corn Belt) and Mid-Atlantic regions focus on water quality because of impacts on the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay [14,40,41]. However, in the California Bay Delta and Columbia River basin, research addresses water conservation, water quality improvement, and wildlife habitat restoration [42].…”

The environmental impact of climate change adaptation on land use and water quality

“…Our agricultural production model builds upon a strand of research in agricultural economics 16,17 . We develop a structural econometric model with a flexible specification of the effects of climate on agricultural land use and production (SM, S1.3).…”

The social costs of second-best policies: Evidence from agricultural GHG mitigation

“…First, GHG emissions from fields or animals are costly or impractical to monitor, making reliance on simulated conditional emission factors, as opposed to direct emissions measurement, necessary for policy implementation. Emission factors depend on local biophysical conditions and observable practices such as crop choice and crop management and they can be used in lieu of actual measurements to provide incentives to agents (Kling, 2011). Second, the emission generation process typically involves multiple margins of adjustment, perhaps contributing to emissions in a nonlinear fashion.…”

“…Such incentives could be implemented, for instance, through crop-specific input taxes or through an abatement action permit system such as the one described by Kling (2011), whereby each observable practice is assigned a number of points commensurate with its abatement potential, the regulating agency assigns each agent a target of points to be reached, and agents are allowed to trade points. 13 Yet, regulating all inputs simultaneously and differently across uses may be politically difficult and costly to implement.…”

“…The social cost associated with a N policy cannot be calculated because the 1 MtCO 2 e abatement target cannot be achieved within the range of social carbon prices considered. 32 The payment schedules we consider are similar in nature to the abatement action permit system advocated by Kling (2011). We prefer to describe a payment system as we are borrowing our monitoring cost from a literature on agri-environmental contracts.…”