CLIMPLEMENT – How farmers and agricultural actors can implement effective climate solutions
Funding
EuroCARE participation through Ruralis – Institute for rural- and regional research
Duration
2020 – 2022
Organisation
EUROCARE GmbH Bonn
Ruralis -Institute for rural- and regional research, Norway
Overview
CLIMPLEMENT is a project designed to reduce GHG- emissions from land-based food production.
It addresses the need for increased knowledge about the transition to a
low-emission society and adaptation to climate change by focusing on structures and processes that lead
to implementation of low-emission management models in agriculture at the farm level. There are a
variety of existing mitigation approaches, such as market-based approaches, technological
developments, improvement of farm management practices, and education. However, there is still no
consensus on which, or which combinations of, various measures are most effective and in what farming
contexts. CLIMPLEMENT will analyse various cases where farmers have implemented low-emission
management models on their farm and how various actors in the agricultural system have contributed
to the changes. The project will develop a dynamic farm level model integrating economy, technology,
agronomy and assessment of GHG emissions. Hence, CLIMPLEMENT will provide valuable
“knowledge about how to implement innovation, technology and additional solutions, and how to
eliminate barriers and improve the capacity for societal change”.
The proposed project will include several categories of contributions from agriculture to reduced GHG
net emissions (Soil and plant cultivation; Animal feeding, breeding and manure; and Energy, recycling
and carbon storage), addressing both mitigation and sequestration.
Contribution of Eurocare and tasks
WP3- GHG farm models: FarmDyn (Britz et al., 2018) is a farm-level model that assesses the impact of GHG mitigation options for dairy farms (Lengers et al., 2013, 2014) and other productions (Kuhn et al., 2019; Schäfer et al., 2017). Originally developed for Germany, it is currently extended to other EU-regions. FarmDyn will be applied to farming conditions in Norway as part of CLIMPLEMENT. FarmDyn features a well-developed GHG emission module and depicts farm management in rich detail at the level of individual field operations. Investment decisions into stables, structure and machinery allow the depiction of farm size effects. The model also considers risk, and will be parameterized and validated for Norwegian conditions. Cost-effective GHG mitigation strategies (i.e., combinations of different mitigation options) will be determined and their impact quantified based on a range of economic and environmental indicators. Model output will serve as a basis for interaction with stakeholders. Feedback from these discussions will be used to refine simulations and co-design models to fit local circumstances. The main output of WP3 will be a list of cost-effective mitigation options for different farming systems in Norway. FarmDyn is open access and open source. Used by a growing network of researchers across Europe, the parameterization of FarmDyn to Norwegian conditions is a lasting investment in a networkbased tool open to the scientific community.
