Personalizing Sustainable Agriculture with Causal Machine Learning

11/06/2022
by   Georgios Giannarakis, et al.
0

To fight climate change and accommodate the increasing population, global crop production has to be strengthened. To achieve the "sustainable intensification" of agriculture, transforming it from carbon emitter to carbon sink is a priority, and understanding the environmental impact of agricultural management practices is a fundamental prerequisite to that. At the same time, the global agricultural landscape is deeply heterogeneous, with differences in climate, soil, and land use inducing variations in how agricultural systems respond to farmer actions. The "personalization" of sustainable agriculture with the provision of locally adapted management advice is thus a necessary condition for the efficient uplift of green metrics, and an integral development in imminent policies. Here, we formulate personalized sustainable agriculture as a Conditional Average Treatment Effect estimation task and use Causal Machine Learning for tackling it. Leveraging climate data, land use information and employing Double Machine Learning, we estimate the heterogeneous effect of sustainable practices on the field-level Soil Organic Carbon content in Lithuania. We thus provide a data-driven perspective for targeting sustainable practices and effectively expanding the global carbon sink.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
04/27/2022

Towards assessing agricultural land suitability with causal machine learning

Understanding the suitability of agricultural land for applying specific...
research
07/17/2023

Understanding the impacts of crop diversification in the context of climate change: a machine learning approach

The concept of sustainable intensification in agriculture necessitates t...
research
09/10/2021

Machine learning reveals how personalized climate communication can both succeed and backfire

Different advertising messages work for different people. Machine learni...
research
04/27/2023

Scaling up Action Through Collective Engagement with Environmental Data

Sustainability has over the past two decades emerged as a key concern in...
research
06/20/2019

Scenarios for Educational and Game Activities using Internet of Things Data

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behavior and hab...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset