Seminario 'Can technology transfer avoid emission leakage from unilateral mitigation targets in agriculture?'

Jesús Barreiro
Institute for Prospective Technological Studies

13.30 horas

Seminarios del Área de Análisis Económico

Abstract: The effectiveness of unilateral efforts to move to a low carbon economy has been put in doubt due to the so called carbon leakage effect both for industrial and agricultural sectors (Pérez Domínguez and Fellmann 2015). In such scenario, domestic production is diverted to world regions with less stringent or no greenhouse gas (GHG) emission constraints and the region which has imposed the emission constraint substitutes its former domestic production by imports of these now relatively cheaper products, reducing economic activity but not changing consumption bundles. From a global perspective, emission leakage can jeopardise unilateral emission mitigation efforts and can, in the worst case, even result in a net increase if total global emissions.

In this paper we investigate how technology transfer can dampen the effect of emission leakage. For this we use the CAPRI partial equilibrium model of the EU agriculture (www.capri-model.org) together with its global spatial multi-commodity model. For the EU, CAPRI endogenously calculates agricultural GHG emission coefficients for nitrous oxide and methane following the IPCC 2006 guidelines. While a Tier 2 approach is generally used for the calculation of activity-based emission factors, a Tier 1 approach is selected for activities where the respective information is missing (e.g. rice cultivation). For the rest of the world GHG emission coefficients are estimated on a commodity basis (i.e. per kg of product) for those commodities represented in the Aglink-Cosimo database (www.agri-outlook.org). For this, IPCC Tier 1 coefficients are used as prior information within a robust Bayesian estimation framework (Jansson et al. 2010; Jansson et al. 2014) combining data on production quantities and emission inventories from FAOSTAT.