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Impact of R&D expenditures, rainfall and temperature variations in agricultural productivity: empirical evidence from Bangladesh
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The potential for land sparing to offset greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture
Greenhouse gas emissions from global agriculture are increasing at around 1% per annum, yet substantial cuts in emissions are needed across all sectors. The challenge of reducing agricultural emissions is particularly acute, because the reductions achievable by changing farming practices are limited and are hampered by rapidly rising food demand. Here we assess the technical mitigation potential offered by land sparing-increasing agricultural yields, reducing farm land area and actively restoring natural habitats on the land spared. Restored habitats can sequester carbon and can offset emissions from agriculture. Using the United Kingdom as an example, we estimate net emissions in 2050 under a range of future agricultural scenarios. We find that a land-sparing strategy has the technical potential to achieve significant reductions in net emissions from agriculture and land-use change. Coupling land sparing with demand-side strategies to reduce meat consumption and food waste can further increase the technical mitigation potential, however economic and implementation considerations might limit the degree to which this technical potential could be realised in practice.This research was funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund for Conservation and we thank its major sponsor Arcadia. We thank J. Bruinsma for the provision of demand data, the CEH for the provision of soil data and J. Spencer for invaluable discussions. A.L. was supported by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate291
Technological spillover in Japanese rice productivity under long-term climate change: evidence from the spatial econometric model
Flypaper effect revisited: evidence for tax collection efficiency in Brazilian municipalities
Pathways Out of Poverty During an Economic Crisis: An Empirical Assessment of Rural Indonesia
Measuring total factor productivity on Irish dairy farms: a Fisher index approach using farm-level data
peer reviewedThis paper presents a Fisher index measure of the total factor productivity (TFP) performance of Irish dairy farms
over the period 2006–2016 using the Teagasc National Farm Survey (NFS) data. The removal of milk quotas in 2015
has led to an increase of over 30% in dairy cow numbers since 2010, and although suckler cow numbers have
dropped slightly, the total number of cows in Ireland reached an all-time high of 2.5 million head in 2016. This large
increase adds to the environmental pressures attributed to agricultural output and puts the focus firmly on how
efficiently the additional agricultural output associated with higher cow numbers is produced. The primary purpose
of this paper is to identify a standardised measure of the TFP performance of Irish dairy farms that can be routinely
updated using Teagasc NFS data. We found that relative to 2010 the TFP of Irish dairy farms has increased by
almost 18%; however, in one production year 2015, when milk quota was removed, the TFP measure increased by
7% and TFP continued to grow by 2.5% in the production year 2016. It would seem therefore that the removal of the
European dairy quota system has resulted in a windfall gain for Irish dairy farmers but that productivity gains are
continuing. Future data will be required to investigate the longer-term TFP performance of Irish dairy farms in the
post-milk quota era
Animal breeding in the age of biotechnology:The investigative pathway behind the cloning of Dolly the sheep
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