Feasibility Study on the Valuation of Public Goods and Externalities in EU Agriculture

Abstract

The present report develops and test an up-scaled non-market valuation framework to value changes in the provision level of the Public Goods and Externalities (PGaE) of EU agriculture from the demand-side (i.e. using valuation surveys). The selected PGaE included in the study are the following: cultural landscape, farmland biodiversity, water quality and availability, air quality, soil quality, climate stability, resilience to fire and resilience to flooding. The following achievements have been accomplished along the project development: 1) comprehensive description of the study selected PGaE, 2) quantification of the selected agricultural PGaE using agri-environmental indicators, 3) standardised description of PGaE disentangling the macro-regional agro-ecological infra-structures from its ecological and cultural services, 4) delimitation of wide areas with homogeneous agro-ecological infra-structures across EU (macro-regions), 5) delimitation of the macro-regions, independently from their supply of PGaE, 6) definition of “Macro-Regional Agri-Environmental Problems” (MRAEP), through the association of the macro-regions with the core PGaE supplied by them, delivering non-market demand-side valuation problems relevant to the agricultural and agri-environmental policy decision-makers, 7) design of a Choice Modelling (CM) survey able to gather multi-country value estimates of changes in the provision level of different PGaE supplied by different macro-regions, 8) successful testing of the valuation framework through a pilot survey and 9) delivering of alternative sampling plans for the EU level large-scale survey allowing for different options regarding the number of surveyed countries, the size and composition of respective samples, and the survey administration-mode, balanced with estimates for the corresponding budgetary cost.