The ecosystem approach,ecosystem services and established forestry policy approaches in the United Kingdom

A series of approaches have been proposed for natural resource management and biodiversity conservation in recent decades. In the important forestry sector, two of the most dominant policy paradigms have been multi-purpose forestry and sustainable forest management. The Convention on Biological Diversity, amongst other transnational commitments, added the ecosystem approach and its related idea of ecosystem services to this succession which is increasingly becoming the basis for natural resource management, including in the United Kingdom (UK). However, this latest addition raises the stimulating question of whether in forestry the ecosystem approach and the associated ecosystem services concept really constitute something fundamentally new, or are merely an extension or re-branding of existing policy approaches. This paper contributes to a lively contemporary debate surrounding the ecosystem approach and ecosystem services, by examining how these two interrelated but distinctly different concepts are currently understood and adopted within UK forestry and in the context of established forestry policy paradigms. For this purpose, I undertook a review of the scholarly literature and legal and policy documents which have been triangulated with a survey of the attitudes, interpretations and opinions of forestry stakeholders through expert interviews. The analysis suggests that in the UK forestry sector, as elsewhere, the frequency of, often broad and ambiguous approaches to natural resource management and biodiversity conservation in general, and forestry policy and management in particular, are causing confusion amongst some stakeholders, who, unsurprisingly frequently conflate concepts seemingly without understanding the details. However, a clear understanding of the differences and similarities of these important concepts, stemming from overlapping but different disciplines, is crucially important for successful policy implementation and sustainable forest management. This article attempts to contribute to such a clarification and to further interdisciplinary understanding.     

Encouraging collaboration for the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale—Rethinking agri-environmental payments

In this viewpoint we draw on insights from participatory agri-environmental policy making, spatial planning and collaborative approaches to environmental management. We propose steps for planning, design and implementation of agri-environmental payment schemes that will encourage collaboration and co-ordinated actions at a landscape scale to contribute more effectively to the continued provision of ecosystem services.     

An institutional evaluation of sustainable forest management in Flanders

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the existing Flemish institutional framework of sustainable forest management (SFM). The evaluation was performed using criteria and indicators that were based on the four-dimensional structure (discourse, rules, power and actors) of the policy arrangement approach. The data collection and analysis were done using a single representative case. The conclusions of the evaluation are mixed. The introduction of sustainable forest management is hampered by different perspectives on SFM and a fragmented network of many different owners with a clear asymmetrical distribution of trust and power. It is, however, enabled by the way that the most powerful and trusted actors in the network – the forest group and the forest service – have the same perspective on SFM perspective as the government. We expect that SFM can be achieved in the near future, although it remains a vulnerable situation.     

How to build multifunctional agricultural landscapes in the U.S. Corn Belt: Add perennials and partnerships

Conservation of ecosystem services in agricultural regions worldwide is foundational to, but often perceived to be in competition with, other societal outcomes, including food and energy production and thriving rural communities. To address this tension, we engaged regional leaders in agriculture, conservation, and policy from the state of Iowa (USA) in a participatory workshop and follow-up interviews. Our goal was to determine constraints to, and leverage points for, broad-scale implementation of practices that use perennial vegetation to bolster ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. Qualitative analysis of workshop and interview data highlighted the complexity involved in achieving multi-objective societal outcomes across privately owned, working landscapes—especially as the Corn Belt region enters a period of rapid reorganization driven by the demand for bioenergy crops. These leaders indicated that initiatives focusing on perennials have the potential to span differences between conservation and agricultural interests by blurring the distinction between working lands and protected areas. Landscape change that transcends private property boundaries to accomplish this goal is dependent upon: (1) facilitation of vertical and horizontal forms of social capital between social actors from different scales and perspectives, and (2) scale appropriate mechanisms that increase the value of perennial practices for farm owners and operators. Our data highlight the adaptive capacity of regional actors to act as intermediaries to shape macro-scale markets, technologies, and policies in ways that are compatible with the needs, the capabilities, and the conservation of local human and natural resources.     

Does extensification lead to enhanced provision of ecosystems services from soils in UK agriculture?

Extensification is offered as a management strategy to reduce the perceived negative effects of intensive agricultural management, e.g. nutrient loss through leaching, emissions of the greenhouse gas N₂O, loss of soil carbon through carbon dioxide emissions, increased nutrient, carbon and sediment loading to surface water, and reduced biodiversity. As part of managed extensification implemented under the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy intensively managed land use types (arable and grassland) are taken out of production for either 5, 7 or 10 years in the UK. The ultimate objective is to establish species-rich grassland (SRG) to which limited or no fertiliser is applied, which attracts subsidy payments under the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. There is little scientific evidence for the anticipated environmental benefits of these newly created SRGs. The legacy of intensive management on soils is likely to limit ecosystem service (ES) provision from former intensively managed sites for many decades following extensification and this commentary addresses this issue. Clearly, programmes of long-term experimental research are needed to quantify the environmental and economic benefits of current extensification schemes in UK agriculture in order to determine whether the benefits for ES delivered by soils out-weigh the costs in terms of loss of production.     

Ecosystem services in spatial planning and strategic environmental assessment—A European and Portuguese profile

Despite the growing interest on ecosystem services (ES) in research, significant knowledge gaps on ES integration in decision making subsist. Particularly, ES-focused profiles of governance frameworks for different policy areas, like spatial planning, are scarce. The goal of this research is to draw a profile on ES integration in the European policy and guidance framework for spatial planning and strategic environmental assessment (SEA). To investigate how this framework might be translated in a particular country of the EU and across different levels of governance, the Portuguese spatial planning and SEA framework is also analysed. To achieve these goals, a content analysis of policy and guidance documents was conducted. We have found a general low level of explicit ES integration, but some notions associated with ES are present in the documents, although more indirectly. Results highlight the potential role of SEA for ES integration. However, in the Portuguese context, the contribution of SEA in practice is currently limited and for the coming years ES will not be specifically targeted or integrated in regional spatial planning practice. Recent changes in the wider European governance framework contribute to potentially higher degrees of ES integration in the future. Nevertheless, bottom-up demand for improved ES integration in plans and policies will be an important driver. Our approach contributes to identify which policies, plans and guiding documents need improved ES integration.     

Can process-based modelling and economic valuation of ecosystem services inform land management policy at a catchment scale?

Land produces a range of benefits, from ecosystem services, but markets only incentivise the production of a small proportion of them. The Ecosystem Approach develops plans for moving towards a more optimal mix. This requires stakeholders to understand the value of ecosystem services and how these values change with land-use and management. We investigate whether process-based modelling and economic valuation can help stakeholders to do this. We do this by applying these tools to a plan to improve ecosystem services delivery in a catchment. To be used in decision-support, analytical approaches need to be relatively inexpensive and rapid, and our analysis was deliberately constrained in this way. Two 25-year future scenarios were developed and compared against a baseline scenario. The first Designated Site scenario was based on enhancing the condition of nationally important nature conservation sites. The second, Ecosystem Services scenario, represented implementing the ecosystem services delivery plan. We modelled the change between the scenarios with an internationally recognised process based ecosystem services toolkit (the Land Use Capability Indicator, LUCI tool) and used the model outputs to inform economic valuation methods. Our selection of which ecosystem services to model and value were initially identified through a participatory approach. However those we could quantify was limited by evidence and data availability. We assessed changes in water quality (phosphorus load), sediment generation, carbon storage and flood regulation. We were able to put economic values on only carbon sequestration and flood regulation. Both the modelling results and the experience of applying the linked modelling-valuation approach are examined in the discussion to consider the limitations to the current usefulness of linking process based modelling to economic valuation for informing land management policy. We explore the origin and nature of these limitations and the key bottlenecks that need to be overcome, applicable to its use in other sites, regions and countries. This includes the availability of suitable coefficients and/or underlying data/evidence to parameterise the model, and the compatibility of model outputs with available economic valuation evidence (for value transfer).     

An assessment of policies affecting Sustainable Soil Management in Europe and selected member states

This paper analyses soils-related policies in Europe and in selected member states and regions. Our approach breaks down policy packages at European, national and regional levels into strategic objectives, operational objectives, policy measures and expected impacts, and assesses the relationships between these elements and soil stakes. Four major policy packages, both at EU and national level (CAP-I, RDP, Environment, national initiatives) were analysed. A numerical scale was developed to quantify the level of “embeddedness” of soil stakes in these policy packages. We found that countries better embed soil stakes into their policies when they also put more efforts on environmental innovation. In turn, countries with a high embeddedness level, with high trust in European institutions and that make more efforts towards renewable energy, tend to propose a wider variety of management practices to farmers for dealing with soil stakes.     

Key issues of land use in China and implications for policy making

The paper aims to comprehensively analyze key issues of current land use in China. It identifies the major land-use problems when China is undergoing rapid urbanization. Then, the paper interprets and assesses the related land-use policies: requisition-compensation balance of arable land, increasing vs. decreasing balance of urban-rural built land, reserved land system within land requisition, rural land consolidation and economical and intensive land use. The paper finds that current policies are targeting specific problems while being implemented in parallel. There is lacking a framework that incorporates all the policies. The paper finally indicates the current land-use challenges and proposes strategic land-use policy system to guide sustainable land use in the future.     

Technology,market policies and institutional reform for sustainable land use in southern Mali

To identify appropriate interventions that support sustainable land use; a farm household modelling approach is applied to analyze micro-economic supply reactions to various policy measures. The modelling framework links agro-technical and economic data, and takes both production and consumption decisions into account, allowing land use and production technology adjustments in accordance with farm household objectives. Different types of farm households are distinguished on the basis of their resource endowments, savings coefficients and time discount rate. Actual and alternative (sustainable) cropping and livestock activities for different weather regimes are defined for southern Mali. The effects on sustainable land use and expected farm household welfare of adopting alternative technologies and modifying prices, transaction costs, access to credit and land taxes are demonstrated. Even with full information on sustainable technologies, strong policy interventions are required to halt soil degradation. Structural policies proved to be more effective than price policies to reduce soil degradation while maintaining positive income effects. When prices are determined endogenously, structural policy loses some effectiveness as an incentive for sustainable land use due to the effect of additional supply on local cereal and meat Prices.     

Sustainable crop intensification through surface water irrigation in Bangladesh? A geospatial assessment of landscape-scale production potential

Changing dietary preferences and population growth in South Asia have resulted in increasing demand for wheat and maize, along side high and sustained demand for rice. In the highly productive northwestern Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia, farmers utilize groundwater irrigation to assure that at least two of these crops are sequenced on the same field within the same year. Such double cropping has had a significant and positive influence on regional agricultural productivity. But in the risk-prone and food insecure lower Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains (EIGP), cropping is less intensive. During the dryer winter months, arable land is frequently fallowed or devoted to lower yielding rainfed legumes. Seeing opportunity to boost cereals production, particularly for rice, donors and land use policy makers have consequently reprioritized agricultural development investments in this impoverished region. Tapping groundwater for irrigation and intensified double cropping, however, is unlikely to be economically viable or environmentally sound in the EIGP. Constraints include saline shallow water tables and the prohibitively high installation and energetic extraction costs from deeper freshwater aquifers. The network of largely underutilized rivers and natural canals in the EIGP could conversely be tapped to provide less energetically and economically costly surface water irrigation (SWI). This approach is now championed by the Government of Bangladesh, which has requested USD 500 million from donors to implement land and water use policies to facilitate SWI and double cropping. Precise geospatial assessment of where freshwater flows are most prominent, or where viable fallow or low production intensity cropland is most common, however remains lacking. In response, we used remotely sensed data to identify agricultural land, detect the temporal availability of freshwater in rivers and canals, and assess crop production intensity over a three-year study period in a 33,750 km² case study area in southwestern Bangladesh. We combined these data with georeferenced and temporally explicitly soil and water salinity information, in addition to relative elevation classifications, in order to examine the extent of winter fallows and low productivity rainfed cropland that could be irrigated by small-scale surface water pumps. Applying observations of irrigated crop sowing dates and yields from 510 wheat, 550 maize, and 553 rice farmers, we also modeled crop intensification production scenarios within the case study area. We conservatively estimate that at least 20,800 and 103,000 ha of fallow and rainfed cropland, respectively, could be brought into intensified double cropping using SWI. Scenario analysis indicates that if 25%–75% of the fallow or low-intensity land were converted to irrigated maize, national aggregate production could increase by 10–14% or 29–42%, respectively. Conversion to wheat would conversely boost national production by 9–10% or 26–31%. Irrigated rice is however unlikely to contribute >3%. In aggregate, these actions could generate between USD 36–108 million of revenue annually among farmers. Intensification therefore has important land use policy and food and income security implications, helping to rationalizei SWI investments. Crop choice, water resource allocation, and water governance will however remain crucial considerations for irrigation planners.     

Applicability of economic instruments for protecting ecosystem services from cultural agrarian landscapes in Doñana,SW Spain

Abandonment and conversion of cultural agrarian landscapes are major drivers behind the loss of ecosystem services in Europe. One incentive for land-use conversion is the higher (private) economic return from industrial mono-functional crops relative to traditional multi-functional ones. However, conversion of cultural agrarian landscapes can involve high direct and indirect costs to society through the loss of ecosystem services. Using as a case study the traditional vineyards surrounding the Doñana National Park, South-West Spain, this research has three objectives: i) to measure soil erosion impacts from the conversion of traditional vineyards in biophysical and economic terms, (ii) to identify drivers of change behind the loss of traditional vineyards, and iii) to assess the applicability of economic instruments to protect traditional vineyards. Our results suggest that uprooting of traditional vineyards is an important driver behind the siltation of the marsh in the Doñana National Park, which in turns involve socio-environmental costs in terms of loss of ecosystem services and cultural values. Subsidy reform to reward management practices that sustain ecosystem services and eco-labelling of vine-derived products are pointed at as promising economic instruments to slow down or reverse abandonment or conversion of traditional vineyards.     

基于政策建模一致性指数模型的宅基地管理 政策量化评价

研究目的：开展中央和地方宅基地管理政策的文本分析和量化评价,为新时期宅基地政策的制定和完善提供参考。研究方法：文本分析法、政策建模一致性指数模型法。研究结果：（1）39项宅基地管理政策制定较为合理,一致性可接受等级及以上的政策数量为28项;（2）中央和地方层面上,宅基地管理存在的共性问题包括发布主体和执行机构类别较少,激励手段不明确,政策保障不完善;（3）区际层面上,宅基地政策的短板因地而异。东北地区对住宅建设的约束不足,中西部地区的信息化管理较弱,西部部分地区宅基地管理监督系统不健全。研究结论：中国宅基地管理政策存在较大完善空间,各地应充分考虑自身特色和宅基地管理现状,在增强可操作性的同时,加快推进宅基地管理立法工作。     

Water in the city: Green open spaces,land use planning and flood management – An Australian case study

With increasing worldwide recognition of the influence of urban development on the hydrological functions of water, there is growing pressure for urban planning to play a greater role in water resources management. Planning for green open spaces in particular can play an important role, as they support important ecosystem services, including those that assist in flood management. It has been argued that interconnected and strategically planned networks of green open spaces should be planned for early in land use planning and design processes, with consideration of water-related ecosystem values and landscape functions in concert with land development, growth management and physical infrastructure planning. Although there is growing recognition of the importance of green open space planning for water sensitive cities and supportive planning measures, there are few analyses of the actual inclusion of this recognition in plans and strategies, or the presence of related actions and planning mechanisms. This paper addresses this gap by comparatively analysing the approaches taken to regional green open space planning in three Australian capital city-regions. Findings indicate the acknowledgement of relationships between flood regulation and green open space planning and various associated planning mechanisms. However, there is limited explicit integration of flood management and green open spaces planning, and significant on-ground barriers to enabling this integration to occur given the legacy of past planning decisions and the lack of information to support implementation. The paper concludes with recommendations for further research to assist planning for green open spaces as an ally to ecosystem services relating to flood management.