More Data, More Climate-Smart Practices? Exploring Enabling Policy Scenarios through an Agent-based Model for the Agricultural Sector

Data and digital technologies show significant potential to support climate actions and the transition to more sustainable production and consumption practices in the agricultural sector. Despite the promises, it remains to be seen to what extent and how data sharing will increase the impact of climate actions (adaptation and mitigation) and the overall sustainability of the agricultural sector. Therefore, in this research, we study first, the conditions under which actors will increase data sharing and data (re-)use to accelerate the transition to more climate-smart agricultural practices and productions, and second, we investigate the most effective corresponding policy scenarios. In doing so, we rely on the case of the Flemish agricultural sector facing data sharing and develop a participatory agent-based model. Our preliminary results show the effect of different policy scenarios with three different foci areas–farmers, data platforms, market actors – on data sharing as well as the economy and environment.