Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

In order to reach Sweden’s goal of achieving a fossil free agricultural sector by 2030, Swedish farmers will need to replace current fossil fuel use with renewable energy practises. One way to motivate such radical change in the sector could be by financially compensating those farmers who voluntarily take on such practices. If this approach is working it can be assumed that more and more farmers adopt renewable energy practices, one important example being replacing fossil fuel with biofuel alternatives. Therefore, this study aims to investigate associations between investment supports paid out in the framework of the Swedish Rural Development Programme for investments in adoption of renewable energy practises and the ratio of biofuels used as energy source in the agricultural sector. The result shows no significant association between these variables. This result can be seen as a sign that the policy is insufficiently implemented and does not sufficiently contribute to the agricultural sector becoming fossil free by 2030. Despite this result, the agricultural sector has achieved the sub-target for 2020 that 25% of all energy used in the sector should come from non-fossil sources. Understanding if the policy influences uptake of the practices it is designed to stimulate is relevant for politicians, policy makers, and organisations like the Swedish Farmer’s Association in their work to make the agricultural sector and Sweden over all fossil free. However, the results presented in this work should be carefully interpreted due to insufficiency in the regression model and challenges with finding suitable data.