David Newburn, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, will give the talk, "Interacting Incentives for Agricultural Conversation Subsidies and Trading Programs: Implications for Water Quality and Carbon Sequestration Benefits in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed," at noon on Wednesday, April 2, in 157 Hosler Building on the University Park campus.
"Emissions trading programs have been promoted as efficient means to reduce nonpoint source water pollution and sequester carbon from agricultural land," Newburn said. "While trading programs are often evaluated in isolation, they compete with longstanding federal agricultural conservation subsidy programs. Both programs target afforestation practices that provide environmental benefits using different payment structures. Trading pays for performance while agricultural conservation programs pay for effort."
In this talk, Newburn will discuss his research that evaluates the performance of both programs in isolation and competition using an integrated assessment model that combines a stated preference survey of agricultural landowners for establishing riparian forest buffers with biophysical models of water quality and carbon sequestration benefits.
The integrated assessment model he employs uses the Chesapeake Bay Program watershed model to estimate parcel-specific nutrient reductions and forest carbon modeling from newly released high-resolution data in the northeastern United States.
"Our numerical policy simulation suggests that the water quality trading program in isolation can provide sufficient financial incentives for landowners to engage in afforestation activities on agricultural land," Newburn said. "However, federal agricultural conservation subsidies largely crowd out water quality trading program when in competition. Stacking carbon payments with water quality trading payments has a trivial impact on enhancing landowner participation rates. Overall, the attractiveness and effectiveness of emissions trading programs for afforestation activities on agricultural land are heavily influenced by the presence and high level of federal agricultural conservation subsidies."
Newburn's research focuses on two main areas: water quality and the Chesapeake Bay and land-use policies for the preservation of farmland and forests. He has worked extensively on spatial models of land-use change for managing urban sprawl and has examined the effectiveness of land-use policies to protect forest and farmland. He has extensive experience in multidisciplinary research groups and committees. He is a collaborator on the NSF-funded Baltimore Ecosystem Study and a research affiliate with the National Center for Smart Growth. He also was appointed to serve on the Chesapeake Bay Program Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee.
He received his Ph.D. in environmental science, policy and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland.
The Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI) was established in 2011 with the goal of promoting policy-relevant economics research that lies at the boundary between economic sciences and the study of natural or engineered systems. The EEEPI initiative is focused primarily on the union between energy systems and environmental management and the development of quantitative tools to address decision challenges in these areas. View more information on EEEPI.
