Fostering a sustainable transition of agriculture

How do we motivate farmers to undertake solutions that foster a sustainable transition of agriculture?

There are, of course, many answers to this question. At the Pioneer Center LandCRAFT in Aarhus Ph.D. student Pablo Ratti aims to solve this question through his research on policy instrument design options.

According to Pablo, monetary compensation (contract) is not a perfect solution if you want all farmers to adopt a climate-changing behavior:

“We assume that all farmers behave in the same way, which is that they respond to monetary compensation. But farmers act in different ways like everybody else in society, and the idea of my project is to try to identify the motivation of the farmers and link it with the farm structure and target the contracts according to these variables,” explained Pablo.

Pablo got the spark to become a scientist when writing his bachelor’s thesis:

“I noticed that doing research, answering questions, is actually very interesting.  I’ve studied economics for my BSc, attended an MSc in complex systems modeling for one year, and completed an MSc in agricultural sciences. Furthermore, I’ve been delving into behavioral science more recently due to the project. So I have a very broad approach to research,” he explained.

Here, you can meet Pablo and learn what he aims to do as a young scientist and why he chose to focus on agriculture.