Cost-benefit Analysis of the Greenhouse Gases Mitigation Options in Livestock
Since many years, the need to abate the greenhouse gases emissions appeared to be more and more obvious for the scientist community, politics, economists and society. While contributing to about 12% of the world anthropogenic emissions (2005), agriculture has an important role to play in the fight against climate change and pollutions. In particular, manure would produce 7% of the world non-CO2 anthropogenic emissions. Thus, it represents a source of agricultural pollution on which many studies have been done to find solutions to these emissions. Anaerobic digesters could be one of the best options. This study will create a simplified economic model to build the Mitigation Abatement Cost curves for the anaerobic digesters in the USA and Vietnam. They enable us to do a cost-effective analysis of the different digesters while classifying them in an ascending order of break-even prices and associating these prices to an amount of gas reduced. They finally give the potential of the American and Vietnamese digesters to reduce the emissions from manure. This study shows the existence of some cost-effective technologies, presents the heterogeneity of the results according to the farms characteristics (such as the localization and the farm size), and proves the importance of the assumptions and data used to build such a model (thanks to a sensitivity analysis of some parameters such as the implied adoption rate of each digester in a country, the scale effects, the discount rate, the "adoption rate").