Interest of site-specific pollution control policies

Owing to increasing environmental concerns the current trend is to bend technical production systems in order to adapt them to the specific characteristics of the milieu and diversify them. Inherent to such dynamics is the issue of how to design the accompanying environmental policies. Theoretically, spatially targeted environmental policies are considered optimal, since economic agents tune their efforts according to the sensitivity of the milieu where they operate. But, according to empirical analyses, this advantage is undermined by the high cost of implementation, monitoring and enforcement. This paper outlines the conditions required for site-specific policies to be effective at least cost. Our starting point is the nitrate pollution of water from agriculture, which varies according to climate, soil type and agricultural production system. Farm management practices enabling to reduce pollution depend on this variability. An interdisciplinary study of the efficiency of differentiating the way this pollution is regulated was carried out on two sites in France. It focussed on assessing the importance of spatial variability in physical parameters and in private and social costs.NONPOINT POLLUTION; SITE SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGY; SITE SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY; ABATEMENT COST; TRANSACTION COST

Final report on the farmer's aid in plant disease diagnoses

This report is the final report on the FAD project. The FAD project was initiated in september 1985 to test the expert system shell Babylon by developing a prototype crop disease diagnosis system in it. A short overview of the history of the project and the main problems encountered is given in chapter 1. Chapter 2 describes the result of an attempt to integrate JSD with modelling techniques like generalisation and aggregation and chapter 3 concentrates on the method we used to elicit phytopathological knowledge from specialists. Chapter 4 gives the result of knowledge acquisition for the 10 wheat diseases most commonly occurring in the Netherlands. The user interface is described briefly in chapter 5 and chapter 6 gives an overview of the additions to the implementation we made to the version of FAD reported in our second report. Chapter 7, finally, summarises the conclusions of the project and gives recommendations for follow-up projects

Opportunities for private sector participation in agricultural water development and management

Irrigation management / Private sector / Public sector / Public policy / Private investment / Participatory management / Privatization / Financing / Farmers / Households / Water harvesting / Africa South of Sahara

A decision support tool (R-SWAT-DS) for integrated watershed management

Best management practices (BMPs) can be used effectively to reduce nutrient and sediment loads generated from point sources or non-point sources to receiving water bodies. Methodologies for optimal, cost effective BMP selection and placement are needed to assist watershed management planners and stakeholders. We developed a modeling-optimization framework that can be used to find cost-effective solutions of BMP placement to attain nutrient load reduction targets. The framework integrates the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) watershed model, spatial representation of BMPs, an economic component, and multi-objective optimization routines in the R environment. The framework can be used to launch individual or iterative BMPs simulations, or search for optimal strategies. Advanced plotting, mapping and statistical analysis functionalities that facilitate the interpretation and assessment of the results are included

Appraising Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Potentials: Effects of Alternative Assumptions

Soil carbon sequestration, Sink dynamics, Mathematical programming, Land use, Optimization, Agriculture, Forestry, Greenhouse gas mitigation