AgriBMPWater: systems approach to environmentally acceptable farming

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Abstract

To help local regulators mitigate non-point source agricultural pollution and implement environment-friendly agricultural practices, a comparison between different existing or simulated best management practices (BMPs) has been carried out within a pluridisciplinary project called AgriBMPWater (FP5 founded). The project has been imagined and built in a pluridisciplinary approach and framework. The approach developed corresponds to a cost/effectiveness assessment of several BMPs in several European watersheds, also including the study of their acceptability by farmers. Thanks to the integrated assessment of existing and potential BMPs, a selection grid contributes to provide assistance to regulators on how to conduct environmental, economic and sociological analyses for helping decision makers. Water quality problems encountered and dealt with in this project include nitrate, phosphorus, sediment, pesticide loads and acid water concerns. Thus, the developed framework allows for a large range of hydrological and economic models, depending on the environmental problem detected in each watershed.

Introduction

The merits of alternative pollution control policy instruments have been a major topic in the environmental literature since the 1970s. The increasing computer capacity developed in the last 20 years has led to the improvement of spatially distributed hydrologic models which seem to give sufficiently precise and reliable results to estimate diffuse nutrient losses at the watershed scale when the input dataset is precise enough (Vachaud and Chen, 2002). Sociologic approaches focus on analysing the social and institutional conditions for agri-environmental management and policy. Yet studies, focusing on the design and performance of input-based instruments and combining hydrologic, economic and sociologic approaches, are still needed (Shortle and Horan, 2001). AgriBMPWater is one such study. It aims to compare best management practices (BMPs) in a three dimensional space which is defined by environmental effectiveness, associated economic consequences and social acceptability by farmers and land-users.

The objective of this paper is to describe the framework that has been built within the AgriBMPWater project to compare the impact of BMPs in terms of hydrological effectiveness, costs for the farmers and society, and their acceptability. We shall firstly describe the framework, then the computer models that have been used in each discipline and what has been done to link them. An application of this framework is then proposed and discussed.

Section snippets

Framework

A comparison between different existing or simulated BMPs has been carried out through a cost/effectiveness assessment along with a study of their acceptability by farmers on eight European watersheds. This project is embedded within a multidisciplinary framework involving eleven research teams. These watersheds, their main production systems and pollution problems, are described in Table 1. Water quality problems encountered and dealt with in this project, for all eight watersheds, include:

Environmental efficiency assessment

Environmental effectiveness has been assessed as the change of water quality resulting from BMPs’ implementation. The effects on water quality of implementing BMPs have been assessed through hydrological modelling. Realistic estimation of the pathways of water flow in space and time is the great challenge of hydrological modelling. This is needed in order to examine environmental issues like surface- and groundwater pollution from point or non-point sources of nutrients, pesticides, acidity and

Model choice

Reducing non-point source pollution has several consequences for the farmers: yield losses when reducing the inputs (Yadav and Wall, 1998), increasing production costs when a greater amount of less polluting input (such as work) is required (Eiswerth, 1993), de-polluting costs (Johnson et al., 1991), the need for increased knowledge on soil and manure (Trachtenberg and Ogg, 1994) and so on. Moreover, the regulator who implements a mitigating policy may have to allocate subsidies or to impose

Acceptability

Agricultural innovations, such as BMPs, and their acceptability have been widely studied using an adoption-diffusion approach (Ruttan, 1994). This has focused on evaluating the causal relationships of the adoption of a new technology mainly with the help of behavioural models or social psychology. Nowadays many research efforts have recognised the limits of this paradigm (Buttel et al., 1990, Ward, 1993, Rogers, 1995). The study of BMPs acceptability in this project looks at the farm-level

Integration

The different policies tested on each watershed have been compared using a two-dimensional graph: the first axis represents the cost-efficiency ratio (expressed in euros per kg of avoided pollutant) and the second axis shows the different acceptability levels associated with each BMP. For ‘technical’ BMPs, the acceptability level comes from surveys. The acceptability of linear and optimally differentiated policies is assessed by the models as being the percentage of farms who benefit from the

Concluding remarks

Improving water quality altered by agricultural non-point source pollution requires multidisciplinary approaches. Combining these approaches raises important difficulties, mostly because each discipline uses its own concepts. Mutual comprehension has been enhanced with common definitions. Working together on the same modelling approach helps comprehension.

Although it would have been an interesting feat to use and provide a common modelling package in which most environmental problems and

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge financial support from EU through the AgriBMPWater project (5th RTD framework program).

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