A Grassland strategy for farming systems in Europe to mitigate GHG emissions - – An integrated spatially differentiated modelling approach

This paper assesses the impact of an EU-wide policy to expand grassland area and promote carbon sequestration in soils. We use the economic Common Agricultural Policy Regionalized Impact (CAPRI) model which represents the EU agriculture by 2,450 mathematical programming farm-type models in combination with the biogeochemistry CENTURY model which provides carbon sequestration rates at a high resolution level. Both models are linked at the NUTS3 level using the location information of the Farm Accounting Data Network. We simulated a flexible grassland premium such that farmers increase grassland by five per cent voluntary and cost efficiently. Our findings are that the GHG mitigation potential and costs depend on carbon sequestration rates, the land market and the induced land use changes, and the regional agricultural production structure. The overall calculated net effect in Europe is a reduction of 4.3 Mt CO2e (equivalents) when converting 2.9 million has into grassland. The premium amounts on average to 238 EUR/ha, summing up to a total cost of 417 Million EUR for the whole EU. The net abatement costs are based on the premium payments and account on average 97 EUR/t CO2e. Substantial carbon sequestration (28% of the total sequestration) can be achieved already with 50 EUR/t CO2e. The carbon sequestration would be most effective in regions in France, Italy and Spain, the Netherlands and Germany. Larger farms and farm-types specialized in cereals and protein crops, mixed field cropping and the mixed crops-livestock farming systems have the highest mitigation potential at relatively low costs.JRC.D.4-Economics of Agricultur