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Coordination and Cooperation for Effective Climate Policy Design and Implementation
Coordination and Cooperation for Effective Climate Policy Design and Implementation is funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in a four-year grant to provide empirical evidence and a clear conceptual framework to encourage cooperation, enabling the Emissions Trading System (ETS) to be applied effectively in agriculture, and to facilitate the coordination required for the rapid uptake of new adaptation and mitigation technology.
Project Summary
Coordination and Cooperation for Effective Climate Policy Design builds on the existing MSI programme ‘Integrated Economics of Climate Change’, working with the EcoClimate group. As a result of the first two years in that programme, and extensive co-funded work with a variety of funders, Motu has identified some key research and science communication gaps that were unable to be addressed within policy timeframes.
Read the Coordination and Cooperation for Effective Climate Policy Design executive summary (75 KB).
Progress Report, June 2011 (98 KB).
Aims and Objectives
The critical political issue for the ETS in agriculture is the impact on farm profitability and rural land values. Current analyses have explored the direct impacts of an emissions trading system on farmers and farming communities but not their ability to reduce that impact through mitigation responses. Only limited modelling has been done of the offsetting impacts of free allocation of units. We have no evidence on the relationship between farm profitability and asset values. We will address these gaps.
A key climate adaptation issue for many communities is how to reduce their vulnerability when faced with an increasingly scarce and variable water resource. The success of any set of institutions will depend on transactions costs, social attitudes, and the preparedness of agents within the society to enforce rules. We will research ways that non-mandatory or voluntary programmes can be used in conjunction with other approaches to facilitate innovation in response to climate change. We will find constructive solutions to correct the wedge between public and private benefits of actions designed to respond to climate change, enabling a rapid uptake of new technologies that result in effective adaptation to water scarcity.
AgDialogue Group
Under this programme, Motu, in collaboration with EcoClimate, has started a dialogue group on how to efficiently control agricultural emissions in the medium term. The dialogue process will draw on and provide feedback to the research discussed above and look to ensure that agricultural emissions are addressed in a way that that is robust, effective, efficient and fair. The group, which is made up of farmers, tangata whenua, and representatives from farm industry groups, NGOs, and the government, and will be informed by a wide range of climate change experts from many different institutions, will meet for the first time in late March. As a complement to this group we will be enhancing our emissions trading games as a tool to facilitate lay-people’s understanding of how the emissions trading system would affect agriculture.
Read about the Agricultural Emissions Dialogue Group. (260 KB)