LFA support in a changing climate : the interaction between the LFA support and drought periods on the use of agricultural land in Sweden

Abstract: With climate change follows an expectation of more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods and change in seasonal shifts. How climate variability might impact Swedish agriculture and interact with existing policy aiming at keeping agricultural land in production is not well understood. This thesis performs an analysis of the interaction between climate variables such as drought and precipitation indexes and the Less Favoured Areas support policy, abbreviated as LFA, the main EU-policy aiming at keeping agricultural land in production. This is done in order to lay the foundations for an increased understanding of how increased climate shocks may impact the land transformation, the rate by which agricultural land is taken into or out of production, in Sweden. Results found that an increase in droughts was linked to a faster rate of agricultural land transformation, partly counteracted by the LFA support, which decreased the speed of land transformation. However a large share of LFA receiving hectares to overall productive hectares in a municipality was linked to faster rates of land transformation in cases