Interest of site-specific pollution control policies: the case of nitrate pollution from agriculture

Theoritically, spatially targeted environmental policies are considered optimal, since economic agents tune their efforts according to their environment. But this advantage can be undermined by the high cost of information. We posit that it is possible to reduce the spatial scale and simultaneously to limit costs and retain environmental effectiveness. In this paper we consider the example of the nitrate pollution of water on two sites in France. Using a bio-physical model coupled with an economic model, we conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of various solutions to mitigate water pollution and we suggest a guideline for investigating the trade-off between the scale of abatement effort and the abatement effectiveness.