by: Bartosz Bartkowski, Nils Droste, Mareike Ließ, William Sidemo-Holm, Ulrich Weller, Mark V.Brady

Agri-environmental payments are a central instrument of policy to improve the environmental quality of agricultural landscapes. In this interdisciplinary paper, a novel design for agri-environmental payment schemes (called payments for modelled results, PAMR) is proposed, where payments would be based on the predictions from site-specific modelling (e.g. with the BonaRes systemic soil model Bodium). In some contexts, such as payments for soil function improvements, this would constitute an improvement against the conventional approaches of either paying farmers in a not site-specific way for adopting generic practices, or paying them on the basis of costly measurements of soil functions, with the associated uncertainty for the farmers.