Food and fuel security in the face of population growth and climate change represent key societal challenges. Extending an arable farm-level bio-economic optimisation model ‘MEETA’ to include dedicated energy crops (DECs) and water metrics, we quantify water use implications and trade-offs...

The topic of integration and development of sustainable chains has lately gained much attention in the academia debates. In particular, how to manage integration in the bio-energy chains is discussed. Integration is a process of progressive dependence among different actors willing to coordinate...

Recent extreme weather events have resulted in an ongoing discussion on the issues of land use and compensation payments within Austrian agriculture. Building on a functional evaluation system for agricultural lands as developed within the Interreg IIIB project “ILUP”, the national project...

The European Union Water Framework Directive requires governments to set water quality objectives based on good ecological status. This includes specific requirements to control diffuse pollution. Diffuse phosphorous (P) pollution plays a pivotal role in influencing water quality with losses of...

There is increasing interest in biomass crops as an alternative farm enterprise. However, given the relatively low uptake of these crops in Ireland, there is limited information concerning the risk associated with their production and its potential impact on returns. The uncertainty surrounding...

Investments in renewable energy, such as new wind farms and hydro schemes, are being promoted as a new means of diversifying rural employment in Scotland*. However, such investments are associated with a range of environmental impacts which might be detrimental to other economic activities, such...

Demand relationships between salmon and a number of wild-caught whitefish and shellfish species using both single equation models and linearised AIDS system framework. The system is well represented although autocorrelation were found in both approaches but this is less of a problem in the...

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is perhaps the most ambitious piece of environmental legislation in the history of the European Union. The Directive consolidates existing water-related legislation and has the stated objective of delivering good status (GS) for Europe’s surface waters and...

This paper addresses the challenge of developing a ‘bottom-up’ marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) for greenhouse gas emissions from UK agriculture. A MACC illustrates the costs of specific crop, soil, and livestock abatement measures against a ‘‘business as usual’’ scenario. The...

Within the context of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the design of effective and sustainable agricultural and water resources management policies presents multiple challenges. This paper presents a methodological framework that will be used to...