Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Modelling of Policies at Farm Level
The
policy coverage
in CAPRI is clearly linked to the layout of the different
components. The regional supply models are able to implement to a large extent the
different premium schemes under the first pillar of the CAP as well as production
quotas and set-aside regimes. Specific consideration was given to the integration
of the different implementation options for the so-called 'Single Farm Payment'
introduced in 2003. Premium ceilings, in values or quantities, were introduced by
the CAP for budgetary reasons. The policy module of CAPRI tries to mimic this
legislation and carries out the necessary adjustment when premium ceilings are
exceeded. At the current stage, payments from the so-called second pillar of the
CAP, comprising rural development measures and including the agri-environmental
schemes, are not implemented in CAPRI, both for data availability reasons and for
missing interfaces in the regional programming models.
In SEAMLESS-IF, agri-environmental payments and other farm level schemes
under the second pillar of the CAP are explicitly considered through the FSSIM
farm-type layer. They can be flexibly introduced by the experiment designer in
a farm-type specific manner. However, the impact assessment of these schemes
is currently restricted to regional case study analysis. An extrapolation to other
regions to allow market level analysis is not possible due to the limited data
availability but also due to the regional diversity of these measures in terms of
design and implementation.
Agri-environmental Indicators
CAPRI, although focusing on the regional analysis of the agricultural sector at the
NUTS 2 resolution, has been developed from the beginning also as
a tool to analyse
agri-environmental interactions
(Britz et al.
2003)
. Pan-European and full sectoral
coverage were deemed highly relevant features for environmental analysis. This led
to a rather well developed description of nutrient flows in agriculture based on
emission factors, and later, to the replication of the IPCC greenhouse gas accounting
guidelines for the agricultural sector (Pérez Domínguez
2006)
. Moreover, CAPRI
was also used to investigate abatement options for ammonia emissions in a combined
application with the MITERRA and RAINS models (Oenema et al.
2007)
.
An obvious drawback of CAPRI is the fact that it only allows limited endogenous
adjustments at the level of specific intensity of single activities, which somewhat
restricts its abilities to model effects of emission taxes or management standards.
Here, SEAMLESS-IF is able to explicitly represent crop growth, nutrient flows and
water-related environmental externalities through the combined use of the APES
and FSSIM models (see Chapters 4 and 5). This leads to the possibility of generating
regional specific alternative activities not currently used in farm management.
These activities may extend the choice set for the analysis of changed incentives for
management practices at farm level.
