Optimizing land use decision-making to sustain Brazilian agricultural profits, biodiversity and ecosystem services
By Chris J. Kennedy, P. Hawthorne, D. Miteva, L. Baumgarten, Kei Sochi, M. Matsumoto, Jeffrey Scott Evans, Stephen Polasky, P. Hamel, E. M. Vieira and 5 more. 2016
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Designing landscapes that can meet human needs, while maintaining functioning ecosystems, is essential for long-term sustainability. To achieve this goal, we must better understand the trade-offs and thresholds in the provision of ecosystem services and economic returns. To this end, we integrate spatially explicit economic and biophysical models to jointly optimize agricultural profit (sugarcane production and cattle ranching), biodiversity (bird and mammal species), and freshwater quality (nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment retention) in the Brazilian Cerrado. We generate efficiency frontiers to evaluate the economic and environmental trade-offs and map efficient combinations of agricultural land and natural habitat under varying service importance. To assess the potential impact of the Brazilian Forest Code (FC), a federal policy that aims to promote biodiversity and ecosystem services on private lands, we compare the frontiers with optimizations that mimic the habitat requirements in the region. We find significant opportunities to improve both economic and environmental outcomes relative to the current landscape. Substantial trade-offs between biodiversity and water quality exist when land use planning targets a single service, but these trade-offs can be minimized through multi-objective planning. We also detect non-linear profit-ecosystem services relationships that result in land use thresholds that coincide with the FC requirements. Further, we demonstrate that landscape-level planning can greatly improve the performance of the FC relative to traditional farm-level planning. These findings suggest that through joint planning for economic and environmental goals at a landscape-scale, Brazil's agricultural sector can expand production and meet regulatory requirements, while maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem service provision.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b529cc3448e55bd240046609321a3f1aad27cf42
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In Economics and Econometrics
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Managing the middle: A shift in conservation priorities based on the global human modification gradient (2019, background): “…types of development including how stressors interact with one another (Crain et al., 2008; Darling & Côté, 2008), and the levels of development and spatial configurations that may push natural systems over ecological thresholds or tipping points (Kennedy et al., 2016; Taubert et al., 2018).”