Impacts of rural development programmes in Germany on the reduction of greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions and associated mitigation costs : paper prepared for presentation at the 181st seminar of the EAAE “Greenhouse gas emissions in the EU agriculture and food sector: potential and limits of climate mitigation policies and pricing instruments”, Berlin, Germany, October 5-7, 2022

The European Union’s (EU) rural development (RD) policy as part of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is considered to be a central instrument to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia emissions from agriculture. We present impacts on and mitigation costs of the reduction of GHG and ammonia emission induced by four German RD programmes 2014 to 2022 for the period 2015-2018/2019. Emission reduction has been of little importance in the RD programmes studied: One third of RD expenditures had climate relevant (side) effects, but only 3 % of RD expenditures were targeted to climate mitigation. RD programme support reduced total GHG in the study regions by 0.1 %, GHG emission in the agricultural sector by 1.4 % and ammonia emission from agriculture by 0.9 %. Compared to set reduction targets, the impacts are rather small. About 90 % of reduced GHG emissions and 25 % of reduced ammonia stem from input-reducing measures as organic farming and other agri-environmental and climate measures (AECM). These emission reductions are likely to be offset by displacement effects elsewhere and have a risk to be reversed. Mainly permanent, non-reversable emission reductions arise from investments and AECMs supporting emission reduced slurry systems, advisory support targeted to water protection as well as from investments into forests and peatland restoration. Estimated mitigation costs include public implementation costs and are lowest for standard RD measures with high uptake rates as e. g. for organic farming. To increase the impacts of RD programmes, more effective measures specifically targeted to permanent and non-reversable emission reduction, are required.