From 23 to 25 March, the annual conference of the British Agricultural Economics Society (AES) took place at the University of Oxford, coinciding with the celebration of the Society’s 100th anniversary https://aes.ac.uk/annual-conference. Around 300 participants from academia, administration, policymaking, practice, and interest groups used the conference as an opportunity to discuss current issues in agricultural economics and to exchange ideas, methods, and research findings.
The plenary sessions focused on the challenges of agri-food policymaking in an increasingly uncertain global environment, as well as on the question of how empirical research can contribute to the design of sustainable food systems.
The numerous parallel sessions also addressed many of these aspects and further highlighted the broad methodological and thematic range of agricultural economics research – from resilience, bio-economic modelling, pesticides, and animal health to rural development and consumer preferences. In addition to the professional exchange, the conference offered numerous opportunities for networking and maintaining contacts, as well as for developing future collaborative research projects.
Julian Zeilinger represented BAB at the conference with the contribution Weathering the Change: How Adaptive Capacity Drives Climate Adaptation Potential of Farms.
As part of the session “Adaptation Economics”, the presentation introduced an ongoing study on the relationship between the adaptation potential and adaptive capacity of Austrian arable farms in the context of climate change. It is based on an econometric model that combines farm-level data with detailed meteorological data. Initial results suggest that farms with a pronounced adaptive capacity also have a greater potential to adapt to climate change. This underlines the central role of adaptive capacity and the need for targeted policies to strengthen climate change adaptation in agriculture. This contribution is part of the project Climate Change Adaptation in Austrian Arable Farming. Further details are available at: https://dafne.at/projekte/klosta
