In June Marit Kragt from the University of Western Australia in Perth visited Ruralis in Trondheim to continue with the work in WP 3, which investigates farmers’ interests in participating in local climate crowdfunding. Marit is an expert on choice experiments, a method that can be built into survey designs. In Coolcrowd, we will use this method to introduce farmers in the survey with a set of different scenarios of local climate crowdfunding and to assess which ones farmers would preferably undertake. This will also assist us for the survey we will conduct with the public in WP4 at a later stage where we will make use of the same approach.

During her visit, Marit Kragt also took the opportunity to give a seminar at Ruralis on carbon farming in Australia, a national policy that pays Australian farmers to store carbon in their soils as a climate mitigation measure in agriculture. Her experience and research expertise in this field specifically to measure attitudes among farmers concerning the costs and benefits of carbon farming is highly relevant for the further progress in Coolcrowd.