Productive versus environmental objectives of agricultural policies dealing with climate change: a French case study

Abstract

The study aims at reconciling contrasting productive and environmental goals of agricultural policies at a given budget in the context of climate change. Based on a quantitative bioeconomic model integrating interdependencies between agricultural systems and agroecosystems, we compare the impacts of 4 contrasted public policy scenarios based either on productive (food or energy) or environmental goals (pollution reduction or ecosystem state) on a set of 18 bioeconomic indicators. We run the policy scenarios under two contrasted climate change scenarios to investigate their robustness. We confirm that it is possible to achieve productive and environmental goals with the on-going budget of European agricultural policy. Synergies between productive and environmental performances exist even if they are not trivial nor systematic. More precisely, an agricultural public policy which focuses on energy production might offer a good compromise regarding the different facets of agricultural landscapes. The Pollution scenario constitutes a credible environmentally oriented alternative even if it remains slightly less competitive regarding both ecological and economic sides than an energy-oriented policy. Eventually, our analysis shows that our conclusions are robust to climate change, suggesting that adequate agricultural public policies might attenuate climate change effects when considering intermediary climate change scenarios.