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Marginal abatement costs of greenhouse gas emissions: broadacre farming in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia
Author(s) -
Tang Kai,
Hailu Atakelty,
Kragt Marit E.,
Ma Chunbo
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
australian journal of agricultural and resource economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.683
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-8489
pISSN - 1364-985X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8489.12135
Subject(s) - greenhouse gas , marginal abatement cost , agriculture , tonne , environmental science , natural resource economics , climate change , agricultural economics , economics , geography , ecology , archaeology , biology
Broadacre agriculture is a major emitter of greenhouse gases ( GHG ). To improve efficiency of climate change policies, we need to know the marginal abatement costs of agricultural GHG . This article combines calculations of on‐farm GHG emissions with an input‐based distance function approach to estimate the marginal abatement costs for a broadacre farming system in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia. The results show that, in the study region, the average marginal abatement cost for the 1998–2005 periods was $29.3 per tonne CO 2 ‐e. Farms with higher crop output shares were found to have higher marginal abatement costs. Overall, our results indicate that broadacre agriculture is among the lowest cost sources of GHG mitigation.