The role of agricultural policies on environmental sustainability and human health: An explorative analysis in the OECD countries

Changes in agricultural policies and availability of inputs have provided farmers with incentives to develop innovative management practices that reduce available resources and inputs. A plethora of recent works are on investigating the impact of the adoption of improved agriculture practices, and especially the conversion of land into more restrictive typology of land-use on the levels of carbon sequestered. The aim of this paper is to investigate how agricultural policies of the OECD countries influences the sustainability and the environment impact in term of forest land area change that is very crucial for carbon stock. In particular, the paper analyzes the correlation between the carbon sequestered and the efficiency of conversion of forests and the change of agricultural area. The paper presents methods and OECD countries data that were collected by means of FAOSTAT. We carried out a twofold approach for examining available data: 1) a correlation analysis was performed among the feature sets by means of the Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Principal Component Analysis. Basing upon data available a forecasting model for forest land area and net CO2 eq forest will be implemented created on a supervised artificial neural network trained on the temporal data by country. Final results are presented and policy implications highlighted, confirming our model’s assumptions.