Ambitious renewable energy targets have been implemented in the EU that can only be attained if further measures are taken to boost biomass production for energy uses on agricultural land. The aim of this discussion paper is to explore consequences for land use and environment if biomass...

The phasing-out of the EU milk quota regime in 2015 challenges the Austrian milk sector and calls for its re-organization. Private raw milk management systems and contracts between milk producers and milk processors and traders will replace the national milk quota regime. The aim of the study is...

Recently, an active debate has emerged around greenhouse gas emissions due to indirect land use change (iLUC) of expanding agricultural areas dedicated to biofuel production. In this paper we provide a detailed analysis of the iLUC effect, and further address the issues of deforestation,...

Concerns about future food security in the face of volatile and potentially lower yields due to climate change have been at the heart of recent discussions on adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector. While there are a variety of studies trying to quantify the impact of climate change on...

Irrigated agriculture will play a crucial role to meet future food demand, but a sustainable water resource management in agriculture is crucial as well. Therefore, the European Water Framework Directive promotes several measures, e.g., the adoption of adequate water pricing mechanisms or the...

Livestock is recognized as one of the major drivers of current and future global change. This is caused on the production side, by the substantial resource requirements (land and water) per unit of output, and the related greenhouse gas emissions, and on the consumption side, by the growing...

The article analyses the combined impacts of mitigation and adaptation strategies of agriculture on the economic performance in a case study region in Austria (South-Eastern Styria). With respect to mitigation the focus is on boosting the use of biomass as an energy carrier in order to...

Direct payments are the most important expenditure of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). They are mostly spent on decoupled direct payments which are intended to be allocatively neutral. Increasing volumes of such transfers imply that distributive aspects of CAP expenditures become more...

Crop rotations are an important factor for the design and implementation of sustainable agricultural systems. Integrated agricultural land use models increasingly acknowledge the role of crop rotations by assessing economic and environmental impacts of agricultural production systems. However,...

Austria aims at increasing its share of renewable energy production by 11% until 2020. Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants fired by forest wood can significantly contribute to attaining this target. However, the spatial distribution of biomass supply and of heat demand limits the potentials of...