Research

VALOR will establish a world leading system to evaluate and explore the impacts of pollinators on local societies and economies. The project team will take a full systems based approach and world leading research methods to explore the local landscape, farm business, societal, policy, nutrition and value chain dependences on pollinators in six case study regions. VALOR embeds policy, practice and business in its core research focus, working directly with stakeholders to develop believable scenarios and accessible tools that will not only facilitate the incorporation of pollinators into decision making at multiple scales, but will allow future efforts by research and private sector actors to easily replicate our approach. Our outcomes will be disseminated through European partners and hosted on our existing knowledge hubs, ensuring impact beyond the end of the project. The Horizon Europe project VALOR is led by the University of Reading, the Institute of Agricultural and Forest Economics leads WP 4 ‘Local scale economic and social dependences’.

With the European Climate Law, the achievement of the EU's climate target formulated in the European Green Deal to reduce emissions in the EU by at least 55% by 2030 becomes a legal obligation. The Fit for 55 package includes a number of proposals to revise and update EU legislation and aims to ensure a coherent and balanced framework for achieving the EU's climate goals. With the presentation of this package, the European Commission proposes a net carbon storage target of 310 Mt CO2 eq in the LULUCF sector for the EU by 2030, and a binding national target of 5,650 kt CO2 eq applies to Austria. In this context, the European Commission proposes to establish a carbon storage certification scheme to provide additional incentives to increase net carbon storage. Within the framework of a study, the potentials for increasing net carbon storage in land use are to be evaluated with a view to achieving the target proposed for Austria. To this end, the willingness of farmers to implement possible additional measures of land management and land use changes with regard to agricultural land will be examined. With the support of the expertise of suitable partners, a practical questionnaire will be developed that asks about the willingness to implement additional measures for additional carbon storage in soil and biomass (compared to the current state) on farms. In addition, a research and presentation of conducive and inhibiting socio-economic framework conditions in Austria for the implementation of measures for carbon storage on agricultural land is carried out.

Energy costs, particularly in the form of electricity, are playing an increasingly important economic role on farms due to the rise in energy prices. As electricity prices will remain at a higher level in the future, but above all become more volatile than before, the economic price risk for farms is increasing. On the other hand, security of supply has increasingly become the focus of social discourse. Due to Austria's high dependency on imported energy sources, this leads to an increasing risk in the security of supply. One form of risk management can be to make the farm as energy self-sufficient as possible. The possibilities for this have become more diverse due to the further development of renewable energy technologies and the investment decision for farms is often associated with great economic uncertainty. This project aims to evaluate the technologies available on the market (in the field of solar power production, storage and use) and operational development paths (flexibilisation measures in efficiency and load management) with regard to energy self-sufficiency from a technical and economic perspective and to survey their acceptance among farm managers. In addition to surveys on motives for such investment decisions and attitudes towards energy self-sufficiency and risk perception, high-resolution energy simulation and business risk assessment models will be developed and applied to typical farms in Austrian agriculture. From this, an Excel tool will be developed to support the work of agricultural advisors and thus make a significant contribution to the development of more sustainable structures in agriculture.