The adoption of the Paris Agreement just weeks before the start of the project led me to focus on the impacts of the PA on agriculture first, through a keynote speech at a conference in Sydney and a paper, which was later published in the European Journal on Risk Regulation.
The next step was to study the Australian Carbon Farming Initiative Act. I found that the CFI Act provides an elaborate legal framework that seems well suited to assess project applications and issue credits to participating farmers who, through these projects, generated real and additional emission reductions, although barriers to engaging in CFI projects do exist. Climate Law published an article on my findings in January 2017.
In June 2016, I presented my findings to stakeholders with around 100 individual farmers, people from agricultural business organisations and financial institutions, non-legal scholars, journalists and a range of people from various businesses in Sydney, as well as in academic seminars at four Australian universities.
As of August 2016, I looked into possible trade law constraints on domestic policies aimed at stimulating climate smart agriculture. I reviewed the boundaries international trade law imposes on domestic and regional instruments aimed at stimulating CSA, such as subsidies and tradeable offsets under a carbon pricing mechanism. This article was published by Carbon and Climate Law Review.
In 2017, after returning to my home university, I first worked on a contribution to a Research Handbook on Climate Disaster Law, focusing on CSA from a disaster law perspective. CSA has to be central to any climate disaster mitigation policy. More attention is also needed for disaster response and for the rebuilding phase after a disaster.
The final step of the project was to assess whether and in how far CSA is or can be promoted through the use of current or proposed EU climate and agriculture policies instruments. I found that these are inadequate to stimulate large scale adoption of CSA practices and technologies across Europe. An alternative approach needs to be developed. The article on this part of the project was accepted by Transnational Environmental Law.
In 2017, much attention was focused on dissemination activities. Various presentations were given to individual farmers, representatives from agribusinesses and agri business organisations, agri banks, agricultural research organizations, Dutch provincial and national authority civil servants and European Commission officials. Early December we launched a large international media campaign to report on my findings.
