The Land-Policy project (ERC Starting Grant No. 101075824) produced five scientific publications, whose common focus is how much public policies — whether agri-environmental, soil-related, or forest-related — causally affect environmental sustainability outcomes, and what factors determine the effectiveness of these policies.
Global agri-environmental policy database (Wuepper et al., 2024, Nature Food)
One of the project’s main contributions was building a database of 6,124 agri-environmental policies implemented between 1960 and 2022 in roughly 200 countries, covering regulations, frameworks, and payment schemes. Based on this database, the project showed that the most common policy type is “command and control” (legislation and regulation), and that the number of such policies has steadily increased over time. The most common policy targets are fertilizer use and forest/biodiversity conservation. The analysis revealed a strong, positive relationship between economic development (GDP) and the number of agri-environmental policies implemented, while also showing that some high-income countries (e.g., Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates) have implemented relatively few such policies. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, the project also found that at least 43% of the border discontinuities in cropland soil erosion between countries can be explained by differences in countries’ soil-related policies.
Culture and agricultural biodiversity conservation (Wang et al., Ecological Economics)
Exploiting a natural experiment in Switzerland, this study examined how culture and policy incentives interact to shape farmers’ biodiversity conservation behavior. By comparing farmers on either side of the French–German language border, and leveraging a 2014 agricultural policy reform that substantially increased agri-environmental payments, the project found that before the reform, French-speaking farmers systematically enrolled less land into biodiversity conservation than their German-speaking counterparts. After the increase in monetary incentives, however, French-speaking farmers increased their participation relatively more, narrowing the culturally driven gap. The findings indicate that while cultural background significantly shapes farmers’ environmental behavior, well-designed monetary incentives can reduce these culturally rooted differences — an important lesson for agri-environmental policy design.
Economics of Ecosystem Restoration (Mirzabaev & Wuepper, Annual Review of Resource Economics)
This comprehensive literature review found that the social and economic benefits of investing in ecosystem restoration far exceed the costs, yet there remains a massive gap between the financing needed (well over $1 trillion) and actual investment (with an estimated annual shortfall of about $900 billion for biodiversity conservation alone). The project highlighted that restoration policies (e.g., payments for ecosystem services, protected areas, restoration campaigns) show highly heterogeneous effectiveness, and that long-term monitoring and counterfactual impact evaluations are often lacking. The review also emphasized that cultural norms and values — also examined in other studies from this project — are important but still underexplored factors shaping policy performance, and that future research should focus more on the political economy of policy implementation and on how environmentally harmful policies could be removed.
Public policies and global forest conservation (Wuepper et al., Global Environmental Change)
In this study, the project combined high-resolution (1 km²) global remote sensing data with two econometric designs (a spatial regression discontinuity design and a differences-in-discontinuities design) to identify causal effects. The results show that about a third of the risk of tree cover loss is determined at the national level (institutions, policies, markets), and that roughly two-thirds of this country-level effect — a reduction of nearly 4 percentage points in the global risk of tree cover loss — can specifically be attributed to public policies. The project also identified which country characteristics best predict whether a forest policy is effective: policy enforcement was the strongest predictor, followed by policy stringency, then property rights security and rule of law. The Human Development Index was positively but not statistically significantly associated with policy effectiveness. The study underscores the central role of national governments and the need for international cooperation to finance and strengthen the implementation capacity of forest conservation policies.
Satellite data in agricultural and environmental economics (methodological review)
The project also produced a methodological guide on how satellite data can be effectively used in agricultural and environmental economics research — for example, to test identifying assumptions, validate alternative (self-reported) measures, support insurance and credit applications, and enable descriptive analyses (such as global mapping of agricultural mechanization). The paper discusses common measurement errors in satellite data (spatial and temporal inconsistencies) and methods to correct for them (e.g., multiple imputation, adversarial debiasing). One of the project’s earlier studies — on the global effect of countries on soil erosion — is cited as an example of how satellite data can demonstrate that border discontinuities are caused by country-specific policies rather than by differences in natural conditions.
