How much multilateralism do we need? Effectiveness of unilateral agricultural mitigation efforts in the global context

Achieving climate neutrality in the European Union (EU) by 2050 will require substantial efforts across all economic sectors, including agriculture. At the same time, an ambitious unilateral EU agricultural mitigation policy is likely to have adverse effects on the sector and may have limited effici...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Environmental research letters 2021-10, Vol.16 (10), p.104038
Main Authors: Frank, Stefan, Havlík, Petr, Tabeau, Andrzej, Witzke, Peter, Boere, Esther, Bogonos, Mariia, Deppermann, Andre, van Dijk, Michiel, Höglund-Isaksson, Lena, Janssens, Charlotte, Kesting, Monika, van Meijl, Hans, Pérez-Domínguez, Ignacio, Valin, Hugo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural industry
agricultural mitigation
agricultural sector modelling
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide emissions
Competitiveness
Economic impact
Economic models
Economic sectors
Economics
Emission analysis
emission leakage
European Union
Farm buildings
Greenhouse gases
Leakage
Livestock
Mitigation
mitigation policy
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Achieving climate neutrality in the European Union (EU) by 2050 will require substantial efforts across all economic sectors, including agriculture. At the same time, an ambitious unilateral EU agricultural mitigation policy is likely to have adverse effects on the sector and may have limited efficiency at global scale due to emission leakage to non-EU regions. To analyse the competitiveness of the EU’s agricultural sector and potential non-CO2 emission leakage conditional on mitigation efforts outside the EU, we apply three economic agricultural sector models. We find that an ambitious unilateral EU mitigation policy in line with efforts needed to achieve the 1.5 °C target globally strongly affects EU ruminant production and trade balance. However, since EU farmers rank among the most greenhouse gas efficient producers worldwide, if the rest of the world were to start pursuing agricultural mitigation efforts too, economic impacts of an ambitious domestic mitigation policy get buffered and EU livestock producers could even start to benefit from a globally coordinated mitigation policy.
ISSN:1748-9326
1748-9326
DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/ac2967