Designation of Co-benefits and Its Implication for Policy: Water Quality versus Carbon Sequestration in Agricultural Soils, The

Silvia Secchi, Manoj Jha, Lyubov Kurkalova (), Hongli Feng, Philip Gassman and Catherine Kling

Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University

Abstract: This study investigates the implications of treating different environmental benefits as the primary target of policy design. We focus on two scenarios, estimating for both of them in-stream sediment, nutrient loadings, and carbon sequestration. In the first, we assess the impact of a program designed to improve water quality in Iowa on carbon sequestration, and in the second, we calculate the water quality impact of a program aimed at maximizing carbon sequestration. In both cases, the policy instrument is the retirement of land from agricultural production. Our results, limited to the state of Iowa, and to the case of set-aside for water quality or carbon sequestration purposes, indicate that the amount of co-benefits depends on what indicators are used to measure water quality. In general, this study shows that improving "water quality" in the sense of reducing nutrient or sediment loadings is too vague. Even if it is taken to refer to in-stream nutrients, because the responses of nitrogen and phosphorus to conservation efforts are not well correlated, this terminology may not provide much guidance.

Keywords: carbon sequestration; co-benefits; environmental benefits targeting; Iowa; land set-aside; water quality. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/publications/pdf/05wp389.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/publications/synopsis/?p=582 Online Synopsis (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ias:cpaper:05-wp389

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().