An Inertia Model for the Adoption of New Farming Practices

<p>Nutrient emissions from agricultural land are now widely recognized as one of the key contributors to poor water quality in local lakes, rivers and streams. Nutrient trading for non-point sources, including farm land, has been suggested as a regulatory tool to improve and protect water quality. However, farmers’ attitudes suggest that they are resistant to making the changes required under such a scheme where this requires them to adopt unfamiliar technologies and farm management practices. This study develops a model of farmers’ resistance to change and how this affects their adoption of new mitigation technologies under nutrient trading regulation. We specify resistance as a bound on the adoption of new technologies and allow this bound to relax as farmers’ resistance to change weakens.</p>

An Inertia Model for the Adoption of New Farming Practices

<p>Nutrient emissions from agricultural land are now widely recognized as one of the key contributors to poor water quality in local lakes, rivers and streams. Nutrient trading for non-point sources, including farm land, has been suggested as a regulatory tool to improve and protect water quality. However, farmers’ attitudes suggest that they are resistant to making the changes required under such a scheme where this requires them to adopt unfamiliar technologies and farm management practices. This study develops a model of farmers’ resistance to change and how this affects their adoption of new mitigation technologies under nutrient trading regulation. We specify resistance as a bound on the adoption of new technologies and allow this bound to relax as farmers’ resistance to change weakens.</p>

Impacts of FERC Order No. 2222 on Dairy Manure Processing in Wisconsin

The agricultural practice of spreading dairy manure to fertilize crop fields leads to widespread air and water pollution, due to uncontrolled release of greenhouse gases, nutrients, and pathogens. The associated environmental and health impacts can be mitigated by deploying manure processing (MP) systems that can capture methane to produce electricity and that facilitate nutrient management. Unfortunately, electricity rates available to MP systems in the United States (US) provide limited economic incentives to promote their deployment. Recent policy enacted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Order 2222) enables distributed energy resource (DER) systems (such as MP systems) to participate in wholesale electricity markets. We present supply chain and market analyses in Wisconsin showing that this order can help activate an electricity bioeconomy that can help mitigating environmental and health impacts resulting from manure spreading. We estimate that this bioeconomy could generate up to $131 million in revenue for dairy farms annually while averting $39 million in greenhouse gas emissions and $182 million in nutrient emissions.

Achieving Blue Growth Post-Weser: a Study of Aquaculture Regulation in the Nordic Region

This article explores how the conflict between the interests of protecting water quality in the coastal waters of the Baltic Sea from nutrient emissions on one hand, and supporting blue growth in the aquaculture sector on the other, has played out in the Nordic legal systems and industry practice. It does so by reviewing the legal and industrial developments in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Åland Islands with a focus on interpretation and application of the common EU regulatory framework, mainly the Water Framework Directive and the ecj Weser ruling, and the response from the aquaculture sector. The study shows that the four studied jurisdictions have taken disparate regulatory approaches in balancing ecological status of waters and blue growth. As a consequence of these legal developments, the aquaculture industry faces difficulty in attaining required permits for their operations in all four jurisdictions and significant uncertainty on how to develop the sector to meet the set growth objectives has arisen.

How unnecessarily high abatement costs and unresolved distributional issues undermine nutrient reductions to the Baltic Sea

This paper systematically reviews the literature on how to reduce nutrient emissions to the Baltic Sea cost-effectively and considerations for allocating these costs fairly among countries. The literature shows conclusively that the reduction targets of the Baltic Sea Action Plan (BSAP) could be achieved at considerably lower cost, if countries would cooperate to implement the least costly abatement plan. Focusing on phosphorus abatement could be prudent as the often recommended measures—wastewater treatment and wetlands—abate nitrogen too. An implication of our review is that the potential for restoring the Baltic Sea to good health is undermined by an abatement strategy that is more costly than necessary and likely to be perceived as unfair by several countries. Neither the BSAP nor the cost-effective solution meet the surveyed criteria for fairness, implying a need for side-payments.

Monitoring, Modeling and Management of Water Quality

In this special issue, we are able to present a selection of high-level contributions showing the manifold aspects of the monitoring, modeling, and management of water quality. Monitoring aspects range from cyanobacteria in water using spectrophotometry via wide-area water quality monitoring and exploiting unmanned surface vehicles, to using sentinel-2 satellites for the near-real-time evaluation of catastrophic floods. Modeling ranges from small scale approaches by deriving a Bayesian network for assessing the retention efficacy of riparian buffer zones, to national scales with a modification of the MONERIS (Modeling Nutrient Emissions in River Systems) nutrient emission model for a lowland country. Management is specifically addressed by lessons learned from the long-term management of a large (re)constructed wetland and the support of river basin management planning in the Danube River Basin.

Remediating Agricultural Legacy Nutrient Loads in the Baltic Sea Region

The Baltic Sea is considered the marine water body most severely affected by eutrophication within Europe. Due to its limited water exchange nutrients have a particularly long residence time in the sea. While several studies have analysed the costs of reducing current nutrient emissions, the costs for remediating legacy nutrient loads of past emissions remain unknown. Although the Baltic Sea is a comparatively well-monitored region, current data and knowledge is insufficient to provide a sound quantification of legacy nutrient loads and much less their abatement costs. A first rough estimation of agricultural legacy nutrient loads yields an accumulation of 0.5–4.0 Mt N and 0.3–1.2 Mt P in the Baltic Sea and 0.4–0.5 Mt P in agricultural soils within the catchment. The costs for removing or immobilising this amount of nutrients via deep water oxygenation, mussel farming and soil gypsum amendment are in the range of few tens to over 100 billion €. These preliminary results are meant as a basis for future studies and show that while requiring serious commitment to funding and implementation, remediating agricultural legacy loads is not infeasible and may even provide economic benefits to local communities in the long run.

Modelling the impact of increased lateral connectivity on nutrient retention in Austrian Danube floodplains

&lt;p&gt;In the last centuries, rivers in Central Europe have severely suffered from hydro-morphological alterations and excessive nutrient inputs. Their adjacent floodplains have the ability to retain transported nutrients in case of inundation, but are subject to progressing decoupling from the main river stem. In the Austrian Danube Floodplain National Park, restoration measures have been carried out and are planned for the near future to increase lateral connectivity in accordance with navigation purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We investigated nutrient retention capacity in seven differently connected side arms and the potential effects of further proposed reconnection measures using two complementary modeling approaches. With existing monitoring data on hydrology, nitrate and total phosphorus concentrations for three side arms, we derived a multivariate statistical model and compared these results to a larger scaled semi-empirical retention model (Venohr et al. 2011). We modelled nutrient retention at current state and after completion of side arm reconnections in a dry (2003) and wet (2002) hydrologic year.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both models show comparable annual retention rates and agree in calculating higher nutrient retention in floodplains where reconnection allows more frequent inundations at low discharges. The semi-empirical approach results in highest retention rates at low hydraulic loads and shows more reasonable results at high floods. On the other hand, the statistical approach predicts increasing retention rates with higher nutrient loads entering the side arms and also takes into account nitrate reduction in the remaining water bodies at times of no surface water connection.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our results suggest that water quality of the Danube River could be improved by increasing parameters related to lateral connectivity between river and floodplain. These include in particular the frequency and area of inundation, as well as nutrient input loads into the reactive zones of floodplains. Still, a frequently hydrologically connected national park stretch after restoration reduces nutrient loads of the Upper Danube by less than 0.1% due to its small areal extent in relation to transported river nutrient loads. In order to sustain an adequate water quality in future, both a reduction in nutrient emissions and a larger area of functional floodplains along the Danube River are required.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Venohr, M., Hirt, U., Hofmann, J., Opitz, D., Gericke, A., Wetzig, A., ... &amp; Mahnkopf, J. (2011). Modelling of nutrient emissions in river systems&amp;#8211;MONERIS&amp;#8211;methods and background. International Review of Hydrobiology, 96(5), 435-483.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Key words:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;River floodplains, lateral connectivity, nutrient retention, river restoration, floodplain reconnection, water quality&lt;/p&gt;

Urban Nutrient Emissions in Denmark in the Year 1900

Pre-industrial emission levels can serve as a basis to set emission requirements in current conditions to approximate natural circulation of resources and protect the environment. In Denmark, the year 1900 has been set as a reference for water regulation purposes. Reliable measurements from this time are not available. To define reference conditions, we estimate point source emissions of nutrients from Danish towns in 1900 based on historic documentation and current quantitative data. The flow of nutrients emitted by humans and animals and in industrial wastewater is quantified based on the assessment of typical discharge routes in a set of model towns. We find that point source emissions were significant, with 4261 t nitrogen and 764 t phosphorous emitted from towns in 1900. The main source were human excrements (61%), followed by excrements of animals held in towns (32%) and industry (6%). Further, 59% of nutrients were discharged directly to water, 22% were used as fertilizer on agricultural soil and 19% were emitted to soil via landfills and spills. Current point source emissions of nutrients to water (6600 t N/year and 900 t P/year) are significantly higher, revealing a need for radical reductions if historic emission levels should not be exceeded in the future.