We consider two approaches to quantify New Zealand farmers’ ability to mitigate their farm’s environmental impact: The construction of marginal abatement cost curves and improvements in farm management practices. Marginal abatement cost curves can be constructed by combining information on...

Understanding the economic value of avoided soil erosion in New Zealand is an important factor in policy decision making enabling the acknowledgement of the costs of erosion to the economy. This paper focuses on potential for afforestation to mitigate erosion risks on marginal agricultural hill...

Among the green lobby and the general public there is urgency for agriculture to clean up its act on environmental issues. Increased intensification of land use and in particular dairying has led to environmental spill-overs that the public is no longer willing to tolerate. Agriculture is in...

Forest carbon is potentially an important income stream for small land owners in Guatemala that would help to cease deforestation and forest degradation pressures. However, the temporary nature of sequestered forest carbon, the risk of environmental disturbances releasing forest sequestered...

Producers of agricultural commodities treat world commodity prices as exogenous. Prices facing regional producers can also be considered exogenous when we aggregate producers over small districts, and even across New Zealand. Through estimation of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, under a...

Agriculture is a provider of food and, to a certain extent, public goods such as biodiversity and landscape, but it can also have negative impacts on natural assets such as biodiversity and water quality. In addition to implementing policies that target individual farmers, different approaches...

This paper describes further progress in a new approach to stakeholder consultation for policies about agricultural land uses and water quality in rural waterways; a process that was begun early in 2012. The initial consultation events provided the basis for a future draft of Greater Wellington...

This paper reviews the progress to date of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and identifies key developments and emerging issues. The paper examines the provision of storage, water use efficiency, environmental flow adjustments, nutrients from land use intensification, biodiversity...