The project

Biodiversity is the living infrastructure that sustains agriculture. It provides the ecological processes upon which food production depends. Within this broader ecological framework, agrobiodiversity plays a vital role in strengthening the resilience and sustainability of agricultural systems ensuring that farming systems can adapt to changing climates and evolving socio-economic conditions. By conserving and using biodiversity wisely, Europe’s farmers can secure long-term food security, ecosystem health, and rural vitality, central aims of the EU’s sustainability transition.

Despite the growing recognition of biodiversity’s value, there remains limited understanding of how nature-based solutions can directly support agricultural productivity and resilience.

The BIOA project is driven by the need to increase the knowledge on the contribution of natural systems and crops diversity to the capacity of farming systems to absorb shocks and sustain yields.

BIOA aims, through an econometric and computational analysis, to:

1. Demonstrate the potential of nature-based solutions in enhancing agricultural resilience;
2. Provide evidence-based recommendations for EU policies and land management;
3. Promote synergies between biodiversity conservation and agricultural productivity;
4. Support the transition toward climate-smart, nature-positive agriculture across Europe.

The Ricardian approach, first pioneered by Robert Mendelsohn in 1994, is used to estimate the contribution of agrobiodiversity to farms values and the long run stability of the net revenues of the agriculture sector. Land revenue elasticities to agrobiodiversity estimated applying the Ricardian model will be used to improve the description of the agricultural sector in the Global Energy Environment Economics Appraisal model (GE3AR), explicitly including the role of agrobiodiversity, and to assess the change in gross damage and the efficacy of adaptation policy of biodiversity conservation.

The GE3AR model is a top-down recursive dynamic general equilibrium model whose main purpose is to assess the final welfare implication of climate change impacts on world economies. The results of the analysis will eventually enable to measure the change in gross damages (lost agricultural output, and country GDP) that arise from accounting for a greater adaptive capacity of the agricultural sector and to assess the effectiveness of the different policies for agrobiodiversity conservation.

The BIOA project contributes to the EU’s broader vision of a sustainable, resilient, and biodiverse Europe, where nature and agriculture work hand in hand to ensure food security and ecological integrity for future generations.
Impacts include:

• Increasing the methodological and core knowledge on climate impacts and adaptation in the agriculture sector.
• Advancing the economic assessment of the role of agrobiodiversity in lessening the impacts of climate changes coupling econometric and macroeconomic models.
• Improving the empirical foundation of IAMs for simulating climate change impacts in the presence of adaptation, combining the econometric approach of the Ricardian model with the computational tools of GE3AR. This will enhance the modelling and assessments of climate change impacts on agriculture and of the efficacy of adaptation policy of biodiversity conservation.
• Exposing the debate on biodiversity conservation and climate change from the research area to the policy arena and non-scientific audience.