“The database is accessible to the general public at this link…researchers from the University of Bonn and the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology (ETH) Zurich have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions. The researchers have used two examples to demonstrate how this can be done: how a country’s economic development is linked to its adoption of agri-environmental policies and how such policies impact soil erosion. Their study has now been published in Nature Food. Although agriculture is vital for our survival and well-being, it is also responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and soil degradation. Countries are therefore adopting all manner of different policies to make agriculture sustainable, from regulations to paying for agri-environmental services. Every year, new laws, programs, and schemes are introduced all over the world while others are abolished, making it hard to keep track of developments. This is a problem for researchers and policy decision-makers alike: How are they to go about making comparisons? How can they tell which measures work in which circumstances? Together with colleagues at ETH Zurich, Professor David Wuepper from the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn has now put together an extensive, easy-to-use database containing 6,124 policies, from over 200 countries, that were adopted between 1960 and 2022…”