How effective is greening policy in reducing GHG emissions from agriculture? Evidence from Italy.
Agriculture contributes significantly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for more than 10% of total CO2emissions in the EU-28 area. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) plays an important role in promoting environmentally and climate friendly practices and needs to respond to the new environmental challenges by better integrating its objectives with other EU policies. In this respect, the recent CAP reform 2014-2020 made a further step, making a large part of direct payments conditional on new agricultural practices beneficial for the climate and the environment, i.e. "greening". In this study we estimate the potential environmental benefits from greening in terms of GHG emissions in four regions of Northern Italy, one of the major European agricultural areas in terms of emissions. The emissions were quantified and broken down into the three main GHGs (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) per production process. This information was subsequently used in a Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) farm-based model on more than 3,000 farms, to estimate the effects of greening on regional land use and its contribution in reducing the total emissions. The new agri-environmental constraints produce a modest abatement of total emissions of greenhouse gases (-1.5%) in the analyzed area. The model estimates a reduction in CO2emissions of about 2%. Emissions from nitrous oxide show a decrease of 2.1% and the reduction in the methane is about 0.4% compared to the observed scenario. The process of "lightening" that affected the greening during the CAP negotiation has inevitably resulted in missing an opportunity to introduce a significant positive change of behaviour into agriculture, in line with the expectations and needs of society for EU agriculture as a provider of public goods.
Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA-PB), Via Po 14, 00198 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: roberto.solazzo@crea.gov.it.
Roberto
R
Solazzo
Department of Biosciences, University of Parma, Viale Usberti 33/A, 43124 Parma, Italy.
Michele
M
Donati
Department of Biosciences, University of Parma, Viale Usberti 33/A, 43124 Parma, Italy.
Licia
L
Tomasi
Department of Economics, University of Parma, Via J. F. Kennedy 6, 43125 Parma, Italy.
Filippo
F
Arfini
CAP reform; Environment; Farm behaviour; GHG emissions; Greening; Positive mathematical programming (PMP)