Program components

NAHARP consists of three components that address the need for reliable environmental information in the agricultural sector:

1. Agri-environmental indicators
2. Integrated economic/environmental modelling and analysis
3. Agri-environmental valuation

1. Agri-environmental indicators

Agri-environmental indicators (AEIs) are the result of efforts to develop new ways of measuring and understanding the links between agriculture and the environment. They are science-based measures of key environmental conditions, risks, and changes resulting from agriculture, and of management practices that producers use to mitigate these risks.

AEIs provide important information to decision-makers on how the sector is performing, why the sector is performing as it is, whether that performance is satisfactory, and how it is likely to evolve in the future. Better decisions about whether and how to improve that performance are the expected result.

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2. Integrated economic/environmental modelling and analysis

The industry recognizes the need to include potential environmental impacts as well as economic and social outcomes in the policy-development and evaluation processes. These challenges make developing a capacity to generate reliable environmental information to feed into the policy decision-making process necessary. To be successful in this endeavour, science must be included in the policy-development process. While the AEIs provide a historical perspective of the environmental performance of the agriculture sector, analytical tools are required to provide a predictive capacity for assessing the outcome of different policies and programs, from both economic and environmental perspectives.

These analytical tools involve integrating economic models with AEI models to try to understand how changes to agricultural policies and programs will affect future economic and environmental outcomes of the sector, in a way that is consistent with government goals and objectives. Integrated models can be used to evaluate existing programs related to environmental performance, and to estimate the potential economic and environmental performance of proposed programs.

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3. Agri-environmental valuation

Through NAHARP, AAFC will begin to develop the capacity to estimate the monetary value of positive or negative environmental impacts that arise from agricultural production. Since there currently exists no markets for agricultural externalities such as atmospheric emissions, or the provision of wildlife habitat, non-market valuation techniques will be used to estimate the value of agri-environmental costs, as well as benefits to the sector and to society that are inherently linked to agricultural production.

Developing the ability to use economic valuation in policy analysis will enable AAFC to conduct cost/benefit and trade-off analysis, and eventually allow the Department to better assess the effectiveness of existing policies and programs.