Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) for climate regulation in UK farmlands

This thesis aims to investigate the design of payments for ecosystem services (PES) for climate regulation service provided by agriculture. The research provides a better understanding of how agroecosystems can contribute towards meeting the UK’s targets to reduce GHG emissions. The research comprised of three main stages. Stage 1 explicitly models the effect of climate change on land use change decisions and its subsequent effect on climate regulatory service provided by agriculture, under high and low emission scenarios defined by the UK Climate Impacts Programme for the period 2004-2060. This includes a comprehensive study of the contribution of the UK farmlands towards GHG emissions, from both changes in carbon stocks and changes in annual flows as a result of predicted land use change due to climate change. Stage 2 evaluates PES scheme design for farmers’ willingness to contribute towards enhancing the climate regulation as an environmental service. This stage employed Choice Experiment to elicit farmers’ choices for two potential payment scenarios, designed for both arable and livestock farmers. It was found, in general, that farmers have a strong aversion to drastic changes in land use management; however, flexibility in certain scheme attributes and appropriate compensations can help to attract farmers. Stage 3 includes a carbon abatement cost analysis for the two potential schemes and provides spatial pattern of the carbon costs through PES schemes across UK. Marginal Abatement Carbon Costs were estimated by calculating the price of reductions in carbon emissions as a result of the adoption of alternative payment schemes. Furthermore, spatial analysis was conducted to provide a linkage between the cost of carbon mitigation and spatial attributes to identify the most cost-effective areas that can be preferentially targeted through the implementation of PES schemes. Overall the thesis confirms that although the agriculture sector contributes to the annual emissions of the UK, it has the potential to contribute towards the mitigation of these emissions as well and highlights the scope of PES schemes for achieving emission reductions. Overall, it assesses the effect of scheme design and socioeconomic characteristics on the effectiveness of a scheme, in terms of its uptake by land managers. It also informs the policy makers about the abatement potential and cost-effectiveness of schemes specifically targeting arable and livestock farms.