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Conference paper - Peer-reviewed, 2014

What land-use pattern emerges with landscape-scale management? An ecosystem-service perspective

Cong, RongGang; Smith, Henrik G.; Ekroos, Johan; Brady, Mark

Abstract

It is argued that landscape-scale management (LSM) of habitat is better than farm-scale management (FSM) when considering the externality of ecosystem services. Given this advantage, how to regulate individual farmers' land-use decisions to achieve the LSM solution is an issue of common concern both for farmers and policymakers. Specifically, it needs to be determined if there exists a dominant land-use pattern that characterizes the LSM solution compared to FSM solution. In addition to the area of habitat, we design a land-use pattern index (LPI) to characterize the configuration of habitat and project itonto the sharing-sparing continuum. We find that the LSM solution is characterized by less intensive farming, and configurations of habitat are closer to land sharing. However, as crop dependency on ecosystem-services declines, the land-use patterns with LSM and FSM converge and the configurations of habitat start to resemble to land sparing. In addition, when habitat quality improves the configurations of habitat on the border farms become important. Finally, the less mobile service-providers are, the more farmers should focus on land-use patterns on their own farms. Our indices of land-use patterns could be integrated into the cross-compliance of CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) to better manage ecosystem-service in the future.

Published in


Publisher: European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE)

Conference

EAAE 2014 Congress: Agri-Food and Rural Innovations for Healthier Societies

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Economics
    Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/60388