Negative Cost Greenhouse Gas Abatement from Agriculture

The February 2011 issue of the Journal of Agricultural Economics includes a study (here) by researchers from the Scottish Agricultural College examining marginal abatement cost curves for emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from UK agricultural, which currently accounts for approximately 8% of total UK emissions (mainly methane and nitrous oxide). They find that emissions could be reduced more than 30% from business as usual by the year 2022 at costs lower than the UK's official shadow price of carbon, which that year will be £34. Nearly half of those reductions could be achieved at negative cost.

Here is the abstract:

This article addresses the challenge of developing a ‘bottom-up’ marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from UK agriculture. An MACC illustrates the costs of specific crop, soil and livestock abatement measures against a ‘business as usual’ scenario. The results indicate that in 2022 under a specific policy scenario, around 5.38 Mt CO2 equivalent (e) could be abated at negative or zero cost. A further 17% of agricultural GHG emissions (7.85 Mt CO2e) could be abated at a lower unit cost than the UK Government’s 2022 shadow price of carbon [£34 (tCO2e)−1]. The article discusses a range of methodological hurdles that complicate cost-effectiveness appraisal of abatement in agriculture relative to other sectors.