Julie REINEIX
After three years of engineering school, I specialized in environmental economics and completed the EEET master’s degree offered by AgroParisTech. My interest for prospective modelling was the driving force behind my application for the internship I am currently doing. The latter, supervised by Pierre-Alain Jayet, is aimed at analysing the physical impacts of European public policies under future climate conditions. As agricultural soils represent 38% of the European territory, it is targeted by major directives aiming at making it more sustainable and/or at exploiting it in order to meet tomorrow’s challenges. For instance, the greening of the CAP targets the sustainability of agricultural soils, while the directive on biofuels promotion establishes sugar beet and rapeseed as partial substitutes to petroleum products. It is thus necessary to study the physical impact of these policies (in terms of GHG emissions, or nitrogen losses for instance), but also to make sure the latter will be able to ensure the right supply of food and bioenergy. Many articles – whose study constitutes the first step of my work – tackle such topics. Some of these works are based on the AROPAj model, developed by the Economie Publique UMR. AROPAj is a European agro-economic supply model that is delineated into farm groups, the latter representing a wide range of farming systems. Each one of these groups is associated with a region and a technical-economic orientation, maximizing its profit under various constraints (constraints required by the CAP or agronomic ones). AROPAj is mostly used to study various public policies via dedicated modules that simulate taxes or quotas by setting up (shadow) prices. Consequently, the second step of my work consists in identifying relevant scenarios, combining judiciously chosen public policies and coherent climate conditions. Simulations will then be performed using a remote server allowing the manipulation of the AROPAj model. Finally, I will study and interpret the quantitative and qualitative effects obtained after the implementation of the chosen policies. Quantitative effects can be the modification of yield functions and inputs – water and nitrogen fertilizers – following a change in water demand. On the other hand, qualitative effects can be the modification of land use.
