Webinars in Economics of Environment, Energy and Transports
At 4pm on Zoom and has a duration of 60 minutes, with questions at the end.
In order to attend the webinar, registration is mandatory. Please use the following link to access the registration form.
Gino Baudry (Imperial College)
Exploring the future of the European agriculture systems between food, energy and greenhouse gas emissions: the AgRI-food SystEm interactive model (ARISE)
Abstract
According to the FAO: should we continue to address the challenges of the food and agriculture system with a business as usual approach “the future will not look promising”. The ARISE (AgRIculture and food SystEm interactive) model has been developed to enable the users to explore a wide range of possible future pathways for the European food and agriculture systems. Four alternative pathways have been developed and investigated in which crop-based biofuels are doubled in capacity, while the shifts towards more sustainable lifestyles and alternative production systems are tackled to different extents in the EU. That is to increase our ex-ante understanding of the evolution and interaction of the key drivers of the sustainability of the whole food and agricultural system. We found the pathways to lower the agriculture sector emissions from 70 to 300 MtCO2eq., compared to 477 MtCO2eq. in 2017; To use the land-use and land-use change and forestry sequestration potential, from -90 to -727MtCO2eq., compared to -262 MtCO2eq. in 2017. And to affect the land dynamics, ranging from a net deforestation for agriculture land expansion, to large amount of spared lands that can be used for biofuels, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and so on (up to 50 Mha). We found the impact of lifestyle shifts to be disproportionally critical, even compared to the other sectors of the economy and the bioeconomy. Should the policy response be blind or passive to the evolution of the lifestyle patterns, the sustainability of the food and agriculture system would be sub-optimal at best. And it would neither lead to achieve significant GHG mitigation, nor lead to exploit the land carbon sequestration potential in the worst case.