Analysis Adoption of greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture: An analysis of dairy farmers' perceptions and adoption behaviour Klaus Glenk a, ⁎, Vera Eory a , Sergio Colombo b , Andrew Barnes a a Scotland's Rural College (SRUC), Land Economy, Environment & Society Group, King's Buildings, West Mains Road, EH9 3JG Edinburgh, United Kingdom b Department of Agricultural Economics, Agroecosost Group, IFAPA, Centro Camino de Purchil, Camino de Purchil, s/n, 18004 Granada, Spain abstract article info Article history: Received 10 February 2014 Received in revised form 19 September 2014 Accepted 28 September 2014 Available online xxxx Keywords: Climate change Mitigation Best–Worst-Scaling Stated preferences Technology adoption Dairy farming The agenda towards greenhouse gas mitigation within agriculture implies changes in farm management prac- tices. Based on a survey of Scottish dairy farmers, this study investigates farmers' perceptions of how different GHG mitigation practices affect the economic and environmental performance of their farms, and the degree to which those farmers have adopted those practices. The results of the farm survey data are used to identify promising mitigation practices for immediate policy support based on their potential for additional adoption by farmers, their perceived contribution to the farm's financial and environmental performance and information on their cost-effectiveness. The study demonstrates the usefulness of including adoption behaviour and farmers' perception of mitigation practices to inform early stages of policy development. This would ultimately contribute to the robustness and effectiveness of climate change mitigation policies in the agricultural sector. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction There has been an increasing policy interest in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture in recent years (European Com- mission, 2008; Gerber et al., 2013; Scottish Government, 2009, 2013b; Smith et al., 2008; UNFCCC, 2008). This can be attributed to the contri- bution of the agricultural sector to GHG emissions globally and nation- ally, and to the cost-effectiveness of agricultural GHG mitigation relative to emission reductions in other sectors (DECC, 2013). Policy makers face a challenge to develop and implement effective GHG abate- ment strategies for agriculture. This requires identifying those mitigation practices that are cost-effective and promise considerable potential for abatement, followed by a choice of suitable policy mechanisms to encour- age their uptake. A key tool for prioritising mitigation measures for policy support are marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) for agriculture (Moran et al., 2011), combining both information on cost-effectiveness and abate- ment potential of a large number of mitigation practices. MACCs show the cost of reducing GHG emissions by one additional (marginal) unit as total GHG abatement increases. Therefore, mitigation practices are arranged in the order of their cost-effectiveness. The abatement potential is estimated against a baseline that represents business-as-usual adoption of mitigation practices. Despite recent methodological refinements (Eory et al., 2012), MACCs developed at the national scale often draw on aggregate information and are therefore mainly useful to provide rank- ings of mitigation practices that can inform high-level strategic decisions and provide a rationale for investments in GHG abatement within a par- ticular sector of the economy. For example, the MACCs developed for the UK model large regions as one farm and thus largely ignore heteroge- neity between farms and farm types. Further, outcomes of MACCs are sen- sitive to a large number of assumptions made via scientific expert judgement, for example regarding adoption rates, effectiveness and costs (Eory et al., under review). There is likely to be significant heteroge- neity of adoption patterns, effectiveness and costs across farms, which can influence overall cost-effectiveness depending on their distribution around the mean values applied in MACCs (De Cara and Jayet, 2000; Vellinga et al., 2011). Another result of MACC analysis is the significant mitigation potential of practices identified to have negative cost. These have been referred to as ‘win–win’ mitigation practices, the result of which has influenced several policy and industry documents (DSCF, 2008; TSB, 2013). These mitigation practices would be expected to be adopted by profit-maximising farmers without requiring any incentive as they reduce the cost burden of production. However, the lack of uptake of practices with negative costs suggests that adoption behaviour is driv- en by a more complex set of motivating factors (Barnes et al., 2009; Barnes and Toma, 2012; Moran et al., 2013) not accounted for in the MACC approach. Further, the currently developed MACCs only comprise a subset of the potential mitigation practices available in agriculture. Accordingly, when advancing agricultural mitigation policy, MACC approaches may be of limited use as they are based on strong assump- tions regarding current adoption rates and largely lack up-to-date Ecological Economics 108 (2014) 49–58 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: klaus.glenk@sruc.ac.uk (K. Glenk). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.09.027 0921-8009/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 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