Foreword

Climate change is the world’s greatest environmental challenge, but progress on delivering a proportionate policy response has been slow and inadequate. Climate change has quickly moved from being a future concern to a present and evident crisis. High temperature records are now routinely broken around the world and the growing frequency of catastrophic climatic events has heightened awareness about the urgency to stabilise global temperatures.

Transforming humankind’s means of production and patterns of consumption to lower greenhouse gas emissions are essential to this goal. Recent scientific research, together with growing public awareness, imply that agriculture will need to be at the forefront of global strategies to keep global warming well below 2^oC. Much of this rests on the sector’s large contribution to climate change; however, concerns about global food security and the importance of agriculture to national economies create policy challenges that are unique to agriculture.

The pricing of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, according to the polluter pays principle, is likely be more challenging than it has been for other sectors, despite its efficiency in correcting the market failures responsible for climate change. Much more policy guidance is needed to manage the multiple and often competing objectives of mitigation, and to improve food security and farm incomes. The present research takes an important step in this direction by showing how different mitigation policies can affect these objectives, and which can help countries identify and further develop policy approaches that are suitable to different national circumstances. It relies on multiple economic models, applied at different scales for a broad range of mitigation policy scenarios.

This book was declassified by the OECD Joint Working Party on Agriculture and the Environment.

Foreword