Browsing by study line "Maatalous-, ympäristö- ja luonnonvaraekonomian opintosuunta"
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(2021)The purpose of this study was to study the current biodiversity management practices in three large size companies and to study the biggest challenges the case companies are facing regarding biodiversity management. Biodiversity loss has been discussed for decades, but in only in recent years biodiversity has been more discussed also from more strategic point of view in the corporate world. The private sector has a considerable impact on biodiversity as well as a large part of the capacity to slow down and change the direction of biodiversity loss. Therefore, it is important that also the private sector considers and manages its impacts on biodiversity. The study was conducted as a qualitative case study including three case companies. The data was gathered through half-structured questionnaires through Microsoft Forms, a one-hour distance discussion with each of the companies, and from the latest annual reports in the fall of 2020. The results showed that biodiversity is considered to be an important topic among the case companies and that they are increasingly considering their impact on biodiversity as well. All case companies expect regulation on biodiversity to increase in the future and also the stakeholder demand around the topic has increased. However, only one of the companies has considered their impacts on biodiversity for years already; they have a management plan and they are following a specific reporting framework. Two of the companies have started to consider biodiversity separately or as a part of their other sustainability topics but they do not yet have biodiversity management plans in place nor do they follow any specific reporting framework. Regarding the biggest difficulties, the results show that especially finding suitable indicators and measuring the impacts on biodiversity are considered difficult. The results also show that understanding the concept of biodiversity and how biodiversity is related to the business is difficult. Companies also see that there is a lot of information regarding biodiversity available, but knowledge on how to use it for managing biodiversity is lacking. The results as well as the literature review indicate that impacts on biodiversity is increasingly managed but there are difficulties that need to be overcome. There are several biodiversity management frameworks that can be used for assessing the impacts and building suitable management plans. The better understanding companies have on their impacts biodiversity and vice versa, the better. It must be noted that the results indicate the views of large size (over 40 million € net revenue) companies in sectors that have rather direct impact on biodiversity. Therefore, the results may differ when studying companies of different sizes and from other sectors.
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(2021)Anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations have raised alarmingly high in the atmosphere during the last century and there is an urgent need for cost-effective climate policies to tackle climate crisis. European Union’s Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is the major market instrument for decreasing the emitted greenhouse gas emissions cost-effectively in the European Union. In addition, EU member states apply complementary and partly overlapping policies with EU ETS. Such demand-reducing policies do not affect the total amount of emissions at the EU level when the emission cap is binding because of the observed “waterbed effect”. However, the effectiveness of overlapping demand-reducing policies has changed due to the implemented Market Stability Reserve, which absorbs allowances from the market while endogenizing the emission cap. Furthermore, market agents can unilaterally cancel emission allowances from the market to tighten the emission cap. Previously Finnish Government committed to phase-out coal by 2029 in order to decarbonize the national energy system. However, there is no full certainty regarding to what extent does the Finnish coal ban reduce total emission at the EU level. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to quantify the cumulative impact of Finnish coal ban and its effectiveness to reduce emission at the EU level. This thesis determines how many allowances shall be unilaterally cancelled at different years to guarantee that the coal ban has a full effect on the total emissions at the EU level. A scenario analysis is conducted through model simulations to showcase how the effectiveness of coal ban could be maximized while minimizing the costs related to unilateral cancellation. This thesis contributes to the limited literature on unilateral cancellations as an instrument to strengthen the effectiveness of overlapping demand-reducing policies within the EU ETS. The results show that the unilateral cancellation is more cost-effective when implemented after the MSR has stopped absorbing allowances from the market because until then, the unilateral cancellation policies are rather low in cost-effectiveness. In addition, earlier the coal phase-out policies are implemented the higher is the effectiveness of the coal ban due to the higher synergies between Market Stability Reserve and demand-reducing policies.
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(2021)Maatiloja käsitellään entistä enemmän yrityksinä, jotka pyrkivät vastaamaan alan murrokseen. Tilojen kannattavuus on jo pitkään ollut heikko ja tätä ongelmaa on lähestytty useasta eri läh-tökohdasta. Yritystoiminnassa tehokkuutta voidaan hakea ulkoistamalla toimia, jotka ovat ul-koistettavissa ja kustannustehokkaasti hankittavissa ulkopuolelta. Tutkielma perehtyy maatilo-jen peltoviljelyn konetöiden ulkoistamiseen vertailemalla oman uuden konekannan kustan-nuksia markkinoilta ostettavaan urakointipalveluun. Ulkoistaminen käsitellään tutkimuksessa strategisena resurssipohjaisena ratkaisuna ja tutkielmassa avataan edellytykset ulkoistamisel-le. Omien koneiden osalta käydään läpi koneiden hankintaan liittyvää teoriaa. Tarkoituksena on havainnollistaa omien koneiden ja ulkoistamisen välisiä kustannuseroja ja mallintaa niiden muutosta viljeltävän alan kasvaessa. Tutkimusaineistona on käytetty Työtehoseuran tuottamaa tilastoa urakoinnin hinnoista, sekä Työtehoseuran TTS-kone ohjelmiston tarjoamaa dataa konekustannuksista. Tutkimuksen menetelminä toimii lineaarinen mallintaminen, sekä yksinkertaistettu nettonykyarvo-malli. Ko-nekustannuksista muodostuu kokonaiskustannus, joka kasvaa viljeltävän alan kasvaessa. Malleilla on määritelty hehtaarikohtaiset leikkauskohdat, jolloin omien koneiden ja urakoinnin yhteiskustannus on yhtä suuri. Tilannetta on havainnollistettu kasvinviljelyn osalta kolmella eri tehokkuusluokalla ja säilörehun pyöräpaalauskorjuun osalta kahdella tehokkuusluokalla. Tutkimus osoittaa ulkoistamisen olevan mahdollinen keino saavuttaa parempi taloudellinen tu-los pienillä viljelyaloilla. Alan noustessa suureksi oma uusi konekanta tulee kannattavammak-si. Tulokset jäävät teoreettisiksi ja perustuvat tutkittuihin tapauksiin, eikä niitä voi yleistää koskemaan kaikkia tiloja.
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(2020)As the global population grows and the demand for agricultural commodities increases, empirical measurement of agricultural productivity becomes all the more important. Agricultural productivity is the relationship between yield and inputs and can in simple terms be decomposed into technical change, technical efficiency and scale-effect. Agricultural productivity and its development with time are often studied using price and quantity indices as well as non-parametric and parametric modelling. In this thesis, a mean-value based pseudo-panel created from FADN farm data was used to analyse the productivity development of Finnish cereal farms between 2000-2018. Several functional forms, assumptions of returns to scale and combinations of variables were used to create and test several parametric models. Technical change was observed both at aggregate level for all size classes and for size classes separately. Pooled, fixed effects (FE) and random effects (RE) models were tested with the pseudo-panel. Pooled models were weighted with the number of observations for each mean-value. Results showed little to no technical change in the various size classes. Returns to scale were increasing in all models. Land was a highly significant factor of productivity growth and was found to be notably more significant than the other inputs, labour, capital and materials. FE model were mostly preferred over pooled models and R2-values of all models were over 95% implying over-complexity of models, particularly in the case of the FE models. Very high VIF values were obtained for variables, implying strong multicollinearity between variables. While results regarding technical change are, at a very high level, in line with previous studies on Finnish cereal productivity, the combination of high VIF, fluctuating elasticities between models and limited degrees of freedom indicate that the pseudo-panel method might not provide valuable results in productivity analysis when FADN mean-based data is used. More data-points per year or farm-level data would be required to increase statistical validity of results.
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