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

The present report develops and test and up 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 evaluation framework has been based in macro-regions which can be defined as areas with homogeneous agro-ecological infra-structures across EU. The following achievements have been accomplished along the project development: 1) comprehensive description of the study selected PGaE 2) Description of the selected agricultural PGaE using agri-environmental indicators, 3) contribution to a better and more standardised description of the agri-environmental public goods and externalities build on disentangling of 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, designated “macro-regions”, 5) delimitation of the macro-regions, independently from their supply of PGaE, disentangling the respective agro-ecological infra-structure from its ecological and cultural services, 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 EU broad regions (the 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.