How can we get climate action in EU agriculture?

Professor Alan Matthews of TCD reports: 'A new paper just published by the EIU School of Transnational Governance puts forward a Strawman proposal to accelerate climate action in EU agriculture https://lnkd.in/dWv6GgDq. 

The three people behind the proposal are heavyweights in EU climate policy. Artur Runge-Metzger is a former Director in DG Climate Action in the European Commission, Peter Vis was central to the development of EU climate policy in several roles in the Commission, including as Head of Cabinet for Connie Hedegaard, the EU's first Climate Commissioner, while Professor Jos Delbeke who currently holds the EIB Chair on Climate Policy and International Carbon Markets at the EIU was previously Director-General of DG Climate Action. All were centrally involved in the development of the EU's climate targets for 2020 and 2030 and the initiation of its Emissions Trading System.

They have produced a Strawman proposal to accelerate the reduction in agricultural emissions with five elements which they argue can turn climate action into business opportunities for farmers and processors. Their five actions are:
1. Creating public demand for voluntary carbon farming.
2. Creating private demand for carbon farming through setting downstream mandatory (and gradually declining) emission intensity standards, for example, per unit of milk or meat.
3. Creating lead markets for novel products such as bio-based materials.
4. Introducing a farm-level incentive system to price emissions implicitly seen as a cap-and-trade AgETS.
5. A new public-private finance facility to finance necessary investments in mitigation technologies, adapting carbon stores to climate change, and support for novel value chains.

The sheer breadth of experience in climate policy design behind this proposal is guaranteed to give it a central position in policy discussions around the 2040 target, even if the authors accept that the politics of getting a political agreement "will be enormously challenging".

WG: You can say that again, given the row back there has already been on the greening of the CAP in the face of farmer pressure!  Measures on climate change have been particularly limited, althoughit is already impacting on farmers.