Journal #J-08/1999
ECECMOD: An interdisciplinary system for analyzing nutrient and soil losses from agriculture
Arild Vatn, Lars Bakken(1), Peter Botterweg(2) & Eirik Romstad(3)
Department of Economics & Reesource Management Agricultural University of Norway PO Box 5033, N-1432 Ås, Norway http://www.nlh.no/ior/ e-mail: arild.vatn@ior.nlh.no

(1) Lars Bakken is at the Dept. of Soil & Water Sciences, NLH, (http://www.nlh.no/ijvf/  )

(2) Peter Botterweg is at SAS Institute, Norway (http://www.sas.com/offices/europe/norway/index.html  )

(3) Eirik Romstad is at IØS, NLH, e-mail: eirik.romstad@ior.nlh.no

Vatn, A., L.R. Bakken, P. Botterweg & E. Romstad (1999): "ECECMOD: An interdisciplinary system for analyzing nutrient and soil losses from agriculture", Ecological Economics, 30(2):189-205.

Abstract:
This article discusses a set of principles for policy analysis of environmental problems. The main focus is on integrating economic and ecological analyses through a mathematical modelling framework. The paper starts by developing a general model for the study of environmental issues. Principles for operationalizing the model are discussed, and ECECMOD-a new modelling system constructed to analyze pollution from agricultural systems on the basis of these principles-is introduced. Some of the results obtained by ECECMOD are presented to facilitate a discussion about the gains to be obtained by this kind of analysis. The study shows that it is of great importance to combine economic and ecological analyses at a fairly high level of resolution when studying environmental effects of complex systems.

Key words: Eco-eco modelling, interdisciplinary research, environmental regulations, nitrogen, erosion.

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