Speaker
Description
Governments must find ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture to meet mid-century net zero ambitions. Changes in farming practice offer emission reduction potential as an important first step to meet ambitious climate targets. Additionally, farmers are increasingly expected to engage in reducing their GHG emissions through contractual arrangements with wholesale buyers. Against this backdrop, and in an evolving agricultural policy environment, payment schemes for low carbon farming might become a key part of the policy mix, because they are based on rewarding positive environmental outcomes, and because they can link actions on farms with the substantial changes in the food system that are ultimately necessary to achieve net zero.
This study investigates farmers' preferences for attributes of low carbon farming payment schemes using data of a factorial survey experiment conducted with 1,229 Scottish farmers in 2024. In the experiment, farmers evaluate hypothetical payment schemes that differ in design attributes following an experimental design. We find that a heterogenous response with regards to acceptance and intention to participate in a carbon payment scheme. While approximately a quarter of farmers is skeptical about carbon schemes irrespective of their characteristics, there is also substantial interest in such schemes among the sampled farmers, the extent of which depends on preferences for scheme characteristics. On average, farmers prefer schemes to be administered by government (as opposed to private institutions), and schemes in which emissions are benchmarked against other, similar farms, rather than their own past emissions. Greater payments per unit of carbon and shorter contracts as well as the option of free advice all improve evaluations. On average, sampled farmers are indifferent to whether the scheme covers the whole farm or only selected farm activities.
Methodologically, the study offers insights into the use of quasi-continuous response scales for acceptance in relation to behavioral intention, in this case farmers' stated willingness to participate in a payment scheme. We find the expected significant correlation between responses to an 11-point scheme acceptance scale and a binary indicator of participation intention. However, there is a considerable degree of heterogeneity in acceptance values associated with intended scheme participation. Notwithstanding the within-subject design used in the study, our findings demonstrate the importance for developing policy recommendations of considering response scales and behavioral indicators in addition to general acceptance within factorial survey experiments.
| Keywords | Low carbon farming payment scheme; factorial survey experiment; multiple response scales; Scotland |
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| Status of your work | First results |
| Early Career Researcher Award | No, the paper is not eligible |
