BESTMAP is an international research project run by a consortium of 13 partners across 7 countries and funded through the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

The main goal of BESTMAP is to improve and contribute to the existing tools used in agricultural policy impact assessment and to develop a new model-based approach to simulate the environmental impact of changes in the CAP, in order to promote a sustainable future for the EU’s agricultural sector.

The Research Group “Global and Regional Land-Use Change” contributes to the project by running scenarios on EU’s biofuel policies and international climate policies. Further, it will elaborate a concept to link economic modelling with individual-farm Agent-Based Models (ABM) aiming to improve the modelling of complex farmers' decision making in economic models.

For more information please visit the project’s website.

To meet Swiss net-zero targets, accelerated market development of sustainable fuels and platform chemicals (SFPC) is needed. The ReFuel.ch consortium, funded by the SWEET (SWiss Energy research for the Energy Transition) program of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE), brings together nine Swiss universities, research institutes, and industrial partners. This interdisciplinary effort will involve contributions from social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, as well as ongoing dialogues with policymakers, market actors and end-users. The consortium's goal is to develop robust consumption and supply paths for SFPC that align with long-term climate policy objectives. The ReFuel.ch project is built around seven working packages and the “Global and Regional Land-use Change” research group of the University of Basel is leading the international social, economic and policy assessment.

Indeed, a national strategy for a sustainable and climate-friendly energy system is closely linked to social, economic, and policy factors on the international level, particularly if it involves significant energy trade, as may be the case for Switzerland. Since most SFPC are expected to be imported, the implications on international markets, social impacts in exporting countries, and (in)direct environmental impacts are uncertain and dependent on the technology used. Therefore, the goal is to assess different pathways while carefully considering these interdependencies in the context of the international policy environment.

• Identify and quantify impacts on selected exporting countries
  Focusing on two potential exporting countries, Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are used to analyze the socio-economic and environmental impacts of supplying SFPC or their feedstocks to Switzerland. Spain, identified as a promising provider of renewable electricity and storage products like methanol, hydrogen, and sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), will be the first case study, with policy scenarios modelled based on findings of other working packages. A similar approach will be applied to a second SFPC exporting country, assessing how increased Swiss demand could impact its economy, society and natural resources.
   
• Identify and quantify impacts on international agricultural markets
  To meet the global demand for SFPC, large-scale deployments of renewable energy production require a considerable amount of electricity and natural resources including land and water. This increasing need for natural resources could impact the international commodity market, influencing the global economic structure. These complex interactions among economic agents will be assessed through CGE models in order to capture the impact of technology diffusion and to simulate different policy interventions.

For more information about the project visit https://www.zhaw.ch/de/forschung/forschungsdatenbank/projektdetail/projektid/7214/