Evaluating the use of marginal abatement cost curves applied to greenhouse gas abatement in the UK agriculture
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Date
27/06/2016Author
Eory, Veronika
Metadata
Abstract
Climate change is arguably the most important global societal challenge. Developing ‘low-carbon
societies’, i.e. reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapting to a changing
climate, is becoming a policy goal across the globe. Agriculture plays an important role in
this transformation. The sector is highly vulnerable to climate variability, and is a significant
source of emissions. At the same time, it has potential for reducing GHG emissions and also
provides opportunity for carbon sequestration in soils and crop biomass.
Policy support for mitigating GHG emissions is being informed by scientific evidence on the
effectiveness and costs of mitigation opportunities. This information is frequently depicted in
marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs), an assessment tool which can help to visualise
the hierarchy of technical measures and their cumulative level of abatement. Similarly to
other assessment tools, MACCs’ suitability to provide information has certain limitations.
Furthermore, different derivations of MACCs are appropriate to answer different questions.
In order to draw both informative and reliable conclusions for policy decisions, the
characteristics of the MACCs and the resulting limitations have to be presented clearly.
This dissertation seeks to answer the general question whether the agricultural MACCs can
be improved so that they provide more comprehensive and tailored information to policy
makers. In particular five limitations of the MACCs are discussed: the lack of representation
of wider effects, the issue of cost-effectiveness of policy instruments and the inclusion of
transaction costs, the uncertainty in the MACCs, the boundaries and the heterogeneity of the
analysis. Theoretical frameworks are developed and case study examples are provided for
these limitations, and the frameworks are assessed in terms whether they achieve the goal of
providing more comprehensive information to policy makers than a conventional MACC.
Furthermore, the dissertation summarises the available methodologies and applications in
agriculture to enhance the MACCs and provides guidelines for researchers and policy
makers about the choice of methods and the communication of the results in order to
improve the use of MACCs in the policy process.