Biodiversity is a highly complex and abstract ecological concept. Even though it is not one physical entity, it influences human well-being in multiple ways, mostly indirectly. While considerable ...research effort has been spent on the economic valuation of biodiversity, it remains to be a particularly challenging ‘valuation object’. Valuation practitioners therefore have to use proxies for biodiversity, many of which are very simple (single species, habitats). This paper presents a comprehensive and critical review of biodiversity valuation studies with special emphasis on biodiversity valuation in order to depict the state-of-the-art in this research field. It develops evaluation criteria so as to identify best-practice applications and shows that the field of biodiversity valuation studies is rather heterogeneous regarding both valuation objects and valuation methods. On the basis of our evaluation criteria and best-practice studies we suggest that to account for the complexity and abstractness of biodiversity, multi-attribute approaches with encompassing information provision should be used that emphasise the roles biodiversity plays for human well-being.
•Many proxies used in economic valuation fail to grasp the diversity aspect of biodiversity.•Most studies use single-attribute proxies, which do not reflect the multi-dimensional complexity of biodiversity.•Multi-attribute proxies are better suited to account for biodiversity, but they are at the minority.•The emphasis on biodiversity roles with respect to human well-being should be imperative.•Provision of encompassing information, e.g., via deliberative approaches, is crucial.
The bioeconomy is currently being globally promoted as a sustainability avenue involving several societal actors. While the bioeconomy is broadly about the substitution of fossil resources with ...bio-based ones, three main (competing or complementary) bioeconomy visions are emerging in scientific literature: resource, biotechnology, and agroecology. The implementation of one or more of these visions into strategies implies changes to land use and thus ecosystem services delivery, with notable trade-offs. This review aims to explore the interdisciplinary space at the interface of these two concepts. We reviewed scientific publications explicitly referring to bioeconomy and ecosystem services in their title, abstract, or keywords, with 45 documents identified as relevant. The literature appeared to be emerging and fragmented but eight themes were discernible (in order of decreasing occurrence frequency in the literature): a. technical and economic feasibility of biomass extraction and use; b. potential and challenges of the bioeconomy; c. frameworks and tools; d. sustainability of bio-based processes, products, and services; e. environmental sustainability of the bioeconomy; f. governance of the bioeconomy; g. biosecurity; h. bioremediation. Approximately half of the documents aligned to a resource vision of the bioeconomy, with emphasis on biomass production. Agroecology and biotechnology visions were less frequently found, but multiple visions generally tended to occur in each document. The discussion highlights gaps in the current research on the topic and argues for communication between the ecosystem services and bioeconomy communities to forward both research areas in the context of sustainability science.
Germany faces on-going degradation and biodiversity loss. As a consequence, goods and services provided by biodiversity for human well-being, so-called ecosystem services, are being lost. The ...associated economic costs and benefits are often unknown. To fill this gap, we conducted a literature review and developed a database of monetary values for the changes in ecosystem services that result from ecosystem change in Germany. In total, 109 monetary valuation studies of regulating and cultural ecosystem services were identified, with the majority focusing on forests and wetlands. In collaboration with valuation experts and the German Federal Environment Agency-Umweltbundesamt (UBA), we defined a set of criteria that economic valuation studies should meet in order to qualify for being used in decision making on national policies. Only 6 out of 109 valuation studies (5.5%) fulfilled the quality criteria for informing such decisions. Overall, monetary information on regulating and cultural ecosystem services is scattered and scarce compared to information on provisioning services, which is accounted for in detail in national statistics. This imbalance in information likely contributes to the distortion in land-use policies, giving preference to maximizing provisioning services in agricultural production and forestry, while neglecting the societal relevance of regulating and cultural services. Decision makers have to rely on only a few cost estimates that are scientifically robust, while being pragmatic to include also vague estimates in cases where data is lacking. The transferability of the monetary values included in our database depends on the biophysical and socio-economic site conditions as well as the decision context of the intended application. Case specific adjustments following guidance for benefit transfer are recommended. Given the lack of applicable studies, we call for more decision-relevant economic assessments. Even in cases where monetary estimates are available, we suggest decision makers to consider also other benefit information available to capture the multiple values ecosystems provide to humans.
The urgency to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and natural resource degradation requires major changes in agricultural practices. Agricultural policy in Germany has so far failed to ...generate such changes; meanwhile, public demands for new regulations are met by widespread farmers’ protests. Against this background, an improved understanding of the factors influencing farmers’ uptake of sustainable agricultural practices is necessary. This study introduces the concept of
action space
to analyze the role of barriers to change which lie beyond farmers’ perceived immediate control. We apply this conceptual framework to the case of diversified crop rotations in Saxony (Germany) and combine semi-structured interviews and a survey to identify key barriers to change and their relative weights. We find that farmers feel rather strongly restricted in their action space to implement diversified crop rotations for sustainable agriculture. The most important barriers pertain to the market environment, which severely limits the feasibility of many crops. In addition, limited regulatory predictability as well as regulatory incoherence and limited flexibility restrict farmers in their action space. The role of resource availability within the farm businesses as well as availability and accessibility of knowledge is ambiguous between interview and survey results. The analysis of interactions indicates that multiple barriers form a self-reinforcing system in which farmers perceive to have little leeway to implement sustainable practices. These results emphasize the need to create an enabling market and regulatory environment in which sustainable practices pay off.
Abstract
Shifting agriculture onto a more sustainable trajectory requires significant changes in farmer behaviour in terms of implementing agri-environmental practices. Understanding the underlying ...factors influencing farmers’ behaviour can provide guidance when it comes to targeting agricultural policies and ensuring that they are effective. This study builds on the 14 domains of the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) to explore farmers’ support needs for adopting agri-environmental practices. TDF ratings from 29 interviews with German farmers reveal the importance of the TDF domains for three agri-environmental practices, namely agroforestry, biological pest control and controlled release fertilization. Farmers state support needs for all TDF domains, but the ratings reveal significant differences in support needs across the TDF domains as well as among the practices. Higher overall support needs for agroforestry and biological pest control compared to those for sustainable fertilization practices may reflect the additional challenges associated with more systemic shifts in farming practices. Applying the TDF to the agricultural context can be helpful for developing targeted and theoretically informed policy interventions.
Wind erosion from agricultural land is an underrated and understudied environmental challenge in Europe. Its societal and policy relevance will likely increase in the near future due to climate ...change and associated increases in the frequency, severity and patterns of atmospheric events such as droughts.
We review the research on this issue and find it to be fragmented, siloed and dominated by natural sciences, leaving important research gaps. The most important gaps that circumscribe a research agenda for the future include specific effects of future climate change on wind erosion, the relevance of wind erosion for public health and ecosystem functioning, farmers' behaviour affecting erosion risk and feedback between land management and environmental change, and appropriate policy approaches to address wind erosion risks. Social science contributions are thus required to make wind erosion research relevant for addressing the related societally most pressing questions.
We provide a social–environmental systems perspective to highlight the potential of inter‐ and transdisciplinary research into wind erosion in times of climate change and the increasingly recognized need to transform agriculture towards more sustainability and climate resilience.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Who owns the soils? What seems to be a straightforward legal issue actually opens up a debate about the ecosystem services that can be derived from soils and the distribution of benefits and ...responsibilities for sustaining functioning and healthy soils. In particular, agricultural land use may be constrained by a lack of properly defined property rights. Using the new institutional economics perspective, we show that multifunctionality of soils and an attribute-based property rights perspective substantiate the intuition that land property implies special obligations towards the common good. The concept of ecosystem services can illustrate the variety of beneficiaries of multifaceted soil ecosystem services. This allows identification of reasons for unsustainable soil management that result from imperfections in the definition of property rights. We suggest implications for improved governance of agricultural soils using two case studies in the EU context: the EU Common Agricultural Policy and the use of planning instruments to steer agricultural soil use in Germany. Thus, we contribute to achieving the societal goals of more sustainable land use by detecting causes of shortcomings in current land regulation and by suggesting governance approaches to support a more sustainable management of agricultural soils.
Agricultural production provides food, feed, and renewable energy, generates economic profits, and contributes to social welfare in many ways. However, intensive farming is one of the biggest threats ...to biodiversity. Although current market forces and regulations such as the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy, seem to foster agricultural intensification, a socially and ecologically optimal land-use strategy should seek to reconcile agricultural production with biodiversity conservation. Research on spatial land-use allocation lacks studies that consider both aspects simultaneously. Therefore, we developed a method that finds land-use strategies with a maximum contribution to social welfare, taking into account the landscape's biophysical potential. We applied a multiobjective optimization algorithm that identified landscape configurations that maximize agricultural production and biodiversity based on their contribution to social welfare. Social welfare was approximated by the profit contribution of agricultural production and society's willingness to pay for biodiversity. The algorithm simultaneously evaluated the biophysical outcomes of different land uses using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and a biodiversity model. The method was applied to an agricultural landscape in central Germany. The results show that, in this area, overall social welfare can be increased compared to the status quo if both social benefits from biodiversity and economic profits from agricultural production are considered in land-use allocation. Further, the resulting optimal solutions can create win-win situations between the two, usually conflicting, objectives. The integration of preference information into the biophysical optimization allows reducing the usually large set of Pareto-optimal solutions and thus facilitates further stakeholder-based analyses. Our explorative study provides an example of how socioeconomic data and biophysical models can be combined to support decision making and the development of land-use policies.
•Agricultural soils are underrecognized in European agri-environmental policy.•Payments for soil functions are preferable to payments for soil health.•Result-based payments are preferable to paying ...for actions.•Modelling can help address limitations of result-based payments.
In this communication, I reply to the recent article by Jeffery and Verheijen (2020) ‘A new soil health policy paradigm: Pay for practice not performance!’. While expressing support for their call for a more pronounced role of soil protection in agri-environmental policy, I critically discuss the two main elements of their specific proposal: its emphasis of the concept of soil health and the recommendation to use action-based payments as the main policy instrument. I argue for using soil functions as a more established concept (and thus more adequate for policy purposes), which is also informationally richer than soil health. Furthermore, I provide a more differentiated discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of result-based and action-based payments, while addressing the specific criticisms towards the former that Jeffery and Verheijen voice. Also, I suggest an alternative approach (a hybrid model-based scheme) that addresses the limitations of both Jeffery and Verheijen’s own proposal and the valid criticisms they direct at result-based payments.
Agricultural soils provide multiple ecosystem services that affect human well-being. Soils’ potential to provide these ecosystem services varies spatially. Socio-demographic and other drivers of ...environmental preferences are also spatially variable. Therefore, preferences for soil-based ecosystem services are likely to be spatially heterogeneous, which may result in different policy priorities across locations. Understanding this spatial heterogeneity of preferences is therefore essential to guide public policy to protect healthy soils. We present a study that combines explorative and hypothesis-driven approaches to understand the spatial heterogeneity of preferences for four soil-based ecosystem services: climate regulation, clean water provision, drought protection and flood protection. Based on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted on a representative sample of the German public, we first use global and local spatial autocorrelation measures to test whether there are any obvious patterns in the spatial distribution of preferences. Second, we use spatial lag models to test a number of hypotheses to explain the observed preference heterogeneity. We particularly focus on the spatial variability of relevant phenomena such as floods, droughts or nitrate pollution of groundwater, and their effects on the studied preferences. Lastly, we compare the results from both approaches in order to see whether the identified patterns are consistent with each other. We find weak patterns of spatial heterogeneity, but our hypotheses are all rejected. This suggests that salience of relevant phenomena and individual affectedness do not have an effect on preferences for soil-based ecosystem services.
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