Trends in private land conservation: Increasing complexity,shifting conservation purposes and allowable private land uses

The terrain of private-land conservation dealmaking is shifting. As the area of private land protected for conservation increases, it is time to understand trends in private-land conservation agreements. We examined 269 conservation easements and conducted 73 interviews with land conservation organizations to investigate changes in private-land conservation in the United States. We hypothesized that since 2000, conservation easements have become more complex but less restrictive. Our analysis reveals shifts in what it means for private land to be “conserved.” We found that conservation easements have indeed become more complex, with more purposes and terms after 2000 compared to conservation easements recorded before 2000. However, changes in restrictiveness of conservation easements varied by land use. Mining and waste dumping were less likely to be allowed after 2000, but new residences and structures were twice as likely to be allowed. We found a shift toward allowing some bounded timber harvest and grazing and a decline in terms that entirely allow or prohibit these working land uses. Interviews revealed staff perceptions of reasons for these changes. Our analysis suggests that “used” landscapes are increasingly important for conservation but that conserving these properties stretches the limits of simple, perpetual policy tools and requires increasingly complex and contingent agreements.     

Habitat and Open Space at Risk of Land-Use Conversion: Targeting Strategies for Land Conservation

Funds available to purchase land and easements for conservation purposes are limited. This article provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that includes heterogeneity in land costs and probability of land-use conversion, by incorporating spatially explicit land-use change and hedonic price models. This strategy is compared to two alternative strategies that omit either land cost or conversion threat. Based on dynamic programming and Monte Carlo simulations with alternating periods of conservation and development, we demonstrate that the positive correlation between land costs and probability of land-use conversion affects targeting efficiency using parcel data from Sonoma County, California.     

Is Passive Farming A Problem for Agriculture in the EU?

We address a new agricultural policy concern following the decoupling of CAP direct payments in 2005: passive farming, whereby landowners maintain their agricultural area to collect payments without producing commodities. It is claimed that passive farming is hindering agricultural development by ‘blocking’ access to farmland for expanding farmers. We evaluate the links between the EU's Single Payment Scheme (SPS), passive farming, land use and agricultural development. Following identification of the rational landowners’ optimal land‐use choice, we evaluate the effects of the SPS using a spatial, agent‐based model that simulates farmers’ competition for land in a case‐study region of Sweden. We show that passive farming does not constrain land from being used in production; on the contrary more land is used than would be the case without the SPS. We conclude that passive farming is not a problem for agriculture, but provides public goods that would otherwise be under provided: preservation of marginal farmland and future food security. However SPS payments on highly productive land inflate land values (capitalisation) and slow structural change, which hinder agricultural development. Consequently CAP goals could be better served by targeting payments on marginal land and phasing out payments to highly productive land.     

Land use determines interest in conservation easements among private landowners

Protection of private lands through conservation easements has garnered recent attention from scientists and conservation practitioners. Questions remain, however, about the specific characteristics and activities driving landowners’ interest in conservation easements and their willingness to consider granting them. Resolving these questions could improve prospects for private land conservation by helping land conservation organizations identify and better understand potential easement grantors. We conducted a survey of 513 private landowners in a peri-urban fringe area in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, USA. Logistic regression analysis returned seven significant predictors of landowner willingness to consider granting conservation easements. Participation in environmental organizations, recreational land-use activities, wild food gathering, and land entitlement were the strongest factors promoting interest in conservation easements. Long-term residency, male gender, and hunting or fishing, on the other hand, significantly decreased the likelihood of considering conservation easements. The findings suggest that landowners most interested in to granting conservation easements are active land users. Notably, among all the land-use activities reported, the most frequent and the most important in predicting interest in conservation easements are those undertaken for recreational and subsistence, rather than economic, purposes. This suggests that while easements might be appropriate for working lands, their role in reconciling land use with conservation requires a flexible definition of work.     

Encumbering harvest rights to protect marine environments: a model of marine conservation easements*

We adapt the concept of a conservation easement to a marine environment and explore its use to achieve conservation goals. Although marine environments generally are not owned, those who use them for commercial fishing often are regulated. These regulations grant harvesters rights to use marine environments in specified ways, and the possibility of encumbering these rights to achieve conservation goals creates a potential role for marine easements. We examine this potential under alternative fishery management regimes and find, generally, that marine easements tend to be most effective when harvest rights are delineated most fully. Our analysis suggests ways that marine easements can have flexibility and transactions cost advantages over other approaches to achieve marine conservation goals. We also propose ways in which the design of laws allowing marine easements should follow, or depart from, the design of laws authorising conservation easements on land.     

长江中下游地区农业经济增长中隐含虚拟耕地资源“尾效”对比研究*

[目的]为进一步科学、系统地评估长江中下游地区主要农产品隐含的虚拟耕地资源对农业经济增长的约束或促进作用,进而为国家正确制定和执行合理的土地管理政策提供参考依据。[方法]基于新古典经济增长理论构建农业经济增长中隐含的虚拟耕地资源"尾效"模型,以长江中下游地区7省、市为例进行实证对比分析,并尝试探索虚拟耕地资源"尾效"存在区域差异的原因。[结果]长江中下游地区主要农产品虚拟耕地资源与农业经济增长存在显著相关,虚拟耕地资源的投入进一步加速了浙江、上海和江苏的经济发展,对安徽、湖南、湖北、江西经济发展的促进和约束程度变化不一;虚拟耕地资源增长率、虚拟耕地资源弹性系数、资本弹性系数是虚拟耕地资源"尾效"存在区域差异的主要原因。[结论]长江中下游地区主要农产品虚拟耕地资源"尾效"整体差异明显,对农业经济增长的影响显著。     

Assessing the fragmentation of construction land in urban areas: An index method and case study in Shunde, China

The fragmentation of construction land due to decentralised urban development, disorderly mixed land use, and large-scale transportation infrastructure poses a threat to urban integrity. There is a need to quantify the fragmentation level in a consistent way for inclusion in planning-related decisions. In the context of China's urban sprawl, this study develops a quantitative and intuitive index approach that planners can use to analyse multiple fragmentation features of construction land within urban areas. The approach can be used in planning policy reviews for timely land-use assessment and can be integrated into urban planning processes for developing strategic land-use scenarios. The method was applied in Shunde, a typical urban area in southern China, and construction-land fragmentation and its impacts on environmental quality were analysed. The results show that the entire built-up area in Shunde displays a high level of fragmentation. Patches of industrial and rural residence have been identified specifically higher fragmentation level. The shortage of available construction land makes land consolidation within built-up areas very important in planning Shunde's future development. Moreover, the land shortage requires the progressive reduction of construction land fragmentation. The results of the study also indicate that although land fragmentation has been affected by transportation infrastructure and the existence of rivers and hills in this region, decentralised decisions from hierarchical local governance regimes have greatly exacerbated this situation. Shunde provides examples of typical land-use problems associated with quasi-urbanised regions in China; construction-land fragmentation is a greater determinant for the sustainable development of urban and rural areas than construction-land growth.     

Extra-legal land market dynamics on a Guatemalan agricultural frontier: Implications for neoliberal land policies

Neoliberal land policies such as land administration seek to improve property rights and the efficiency of land markets to boost rural economic production. Quantitative studies of pre-existing land markets can help planners to tailor these policies to local conditions. In this article we examine an extra-legal land market currently being modernized by a World Bank-sponsored land administration effort. Specifically, we use a hedonic-type revealed preference model and household survey data to estimate the factors affecting extra-legal land prices along an agricultural frontier in Petén, Guatemala. Our model indicates that land value is significantly affected by land attributes including location, tenure status, presence of water, distance to roads, and distance to landowners’ homes, and that land prices in the northwestern Petén are estimated to have risen on average 26.5% per year between 1977 and 2000. We contend that this rate of increase provides a strong incentive for colonists to speculate in land rather than invest in state sanctioned property rights. We conclude that if frontier development programs, such as land administration, are to become attractive to settlers in Petén and elsewhere, they must compete favorably with economic incentives associated with land speculation, or alternatively, target landowners who are not interested in playing the land market.     

Agriculture in transition economies: from common heritage to divergence

The 23 former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) started the transition in 1989–1990 from a common institutional and organizational heritage, represented by the Soviet agricultural model. Despite the common heritage in agriculture, the reform policies in CEE and CIS diverged from the start, as significant differences emerged between the two groups of countries in legal attitudes to private land ownership, transferability of land, the extent of agricultural privatization and individualization, and restructuring of farms. This divergence in the implementation of agricultural reform has led to divergence in standard development measures: the CEE countries are outperforming the CIS countries by growth in GDP and agricultural product since 1992; the productivity of agricultural labor in CEE is generally increasing, and in CIS it is decreasing. While the CIS countries at best can be characterized as reluctant reformers, the CEE countries have achieved significantly higher levels of economic and institutional reform. Better performance in CEE is associated with greater readiness of the governments in these countries to implement a comprehensive package of economic and social reform policies, including more radical land reform and deeper individualization and restructuring of agriculture.     

Government Expenditures,Health Outcomes and Marginal Productivity of Agricultural Inputs: The Case of Tanzania

This paper examines the impact of health expenditures on agricultural labour productivity in order to inform the necessary policy decisions about targeting scarce public resources towards their most effective uses. We link health sector expenditures in rural Tanzania to health outcomes and agricultural labour productivity using data from the 2008 Household Budget Survey (10,975 households) and the 2007/08 Agricultural Census (52,594 households) across 113 districts in Tanzania. The results indicate that the marginal productivity of labour as well as land and fertilisers respond significantly to health expenditures. However, the magnitude of the response varies across types of disease, categories of expenditures and agricultural inputs. These findings suggest both the need and scope for targeting public expenditures in the health sector to achieve better agricultural growth outcomes.     

Can farmers extend their cultivation areas in urban agriculture? A contribution from agronomic analysis of market gardening systems around Mahajanga (Madagascar)

The rapid urbanization in developing countries implies an increasing pressure on urban agriculture for production. As most perishable food products come from this agriculture in close proximity to population concentrations, we analysed from an agronomic point of view how market-garden farmers can meet this increasing urban demand. This work took place in the case of Mahajanga, a secondary city with high increasing demographic rate on the Northwest coast of Madagascar. Based on preliminary surveys to characterize the farming systems (on a sample of 91 farms), 11 market-garden farmers chosen in the three main agricultural zones of the urban area were surveyed during two years. Surveys aimed at understanding their decision rules in crop choices, crop allocation to land and resource management, and to estimate their room for manoeuvre to increase their leafy vegetable areas under cultivation. The wholesalers and retailers who buy the farmers’ produce were also surveyed. A previous model of decision rules regarding crop location on farm territory was used to analyse the on-farm surveys and cartographic methods (GIS and on-farm manual representations) were used to quantify the land use. We highlight the following major points. (1) The leafy vegetable production in the surveyed farms already intensively uses land: farmers have complex decision rules largely depending on the water dynamics in the two main environments (lowlands and lakesides) where leafy vegetables are cultivated during the dry season. (2) The scarcity of farmers’ resources (labour money and water) leads to very little internal room for manoeuvre to increase the leafy vegetable production in the farms. (3) At territorial level however, some land reserve exist in one of the lowlands, but not on lakesides. The water availability for agriculture must be better informed through specialized hydrologic studies, as one of the main constraints nowadays to extend the agricultural area. An extrapolation to other cases of urban agriculture is then discussed as well as the role of agronomy to help urban planners to consider the place of agriculture in the urban development.     

农业高质量发展空间布局研究

目的 优化农业空间布局是构建发展新格局、推进农业高质量发展的重要内容,也是保障国家粮食及其他重要农产品供给安全的重要支撑。方法 文章以高质量发展理念为指导,运用数据分析与文献研究相结合的方法,系统分析我国农业空间格局的现状、历史演变和存在问题,阐明农业高质量发展的核心要义,构建农业高质量发展空间格局优化方案。结果 1978—2019年我国农业生产重心逐渐向北推进,土地密集型农产品北移和资金密集型农产品东移。未来我国农业发展在农产品供需、自然资源、生态环境、农产品生产、国际市场贸易等方面存在诸多不确定性和潜在风险。结论 基于高质量发展的“产品高品质、生产高效率、产业高安全和经济高价值”四大核心要义,综合考虑国家粮食安全、生态安全、配置效率和乡村振兴等因素,研究提出2035年全国“六区十一带”农业空间战略格局及其耕地保护利用格局方案与相关配套政策措施建议。     

The Edmonton-Calgary corridor: Simulating future land cover change under potential government intervention

The region connecting Edmonton and Calgary, the two largest cities in Alberta, contains rich agricultural land and is one of the most rapidly changing areas in the province. There is little legislation to restrict urban sprawl or adequately protect agricultural land or native grasslands, and there has been little research to predict future alteration. The main study objectives are, therefore, to assess historical changes in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor from 1984 to 2013 and simulate the future landscape change to 2022 under potential government intervention scenarios. Satellite imagery from Landsat, used in conjunction with biogeophysical variables, was used to create a history of cover in the Edmonton-Calgary area. This history of the environment can be used as a baseline to project changes into the future. Testing different legislative scenarios under two major branches of modifying rates of change or locations of change can be used to identify effective policies for limiting damage to the environment while still allowing for urban growth. Five scenarios were created for this purpose: (1) business as usual, (2) increased rate of urban expansion, (3) no urban expansion, (4) implementation of greenbelts around urban areas, (5) protection of the best agricultural land. This study finds that over the past 30 years, urban area has nearly doubled in size, targeting predominately farmland, especially due to an increase in rural subdivisions. Each scenario impacts growth differently, however, greenbelts and the no expansion model decease growth the most, while the agricultural protection is comparable to the business as usual scenario.     

Planning for Agricultural Change and Economic Transformation in Tanzania?

Recently, Tanzania witnessed a revival of economic planning that explicitly aimed to combine rapid economic growth with accelerated structural transformation of the economy. To achieve these planning targets would require a relatively modest drop in the share of agriculture in GDP, but a dramatic fall in its share in employment by 2025. Tanzanian planners assume that labour is locked in agriculture because agricultural productivity is low, from which they conclude that, to release labour to fuel the expansion of manufacturing, it is imperative to raise agricultural productivity by appropriate land policies, leveraging private investment and developing public–private partnerships. We argue that, analytically, this planning argument leaves out the possibility that causality may run the other way – from high labour retention in agriculture to low agricultural productivity – and that, empirically, the observed patterns inherent in actual processes of economic transformation in Tanzania do not tally well with the assumptions of planners. More specifically, in so far as labour flows out of agriculture, it flows towards informal‐sector activities, both rural and urban, rather than towards formal manufacturing.     

Urban encroachment,forest regrowth and land-use institutions: Does zoning matter?

As concern grows regarding urban sprawl and forest and agricultural land preservation, the effectiveness of land-use policies in shaping land-use change warrants further study. We evaluate the impact of county-level zoning laws, the most predominant land use policy in the USA, and land rents on the relative amounts of forest, agricultural, and developed land, while controlling for demographic information and taxation rates. Over the past decades, southern Indiana has experienced forest regrowth on private lands, but this regrowth has declined in recent years with increased conversion of open space for urban residential development. We develop a model of land-use shares in 40 southern Indiana counties based on the net benefits to agriculture, forestland, and urban uses using a maximum likelihood estimation of a Dirichlet distribution. We find agricultural land rent and indicators of land productivity are the most important predictors of the proportion of agriculture and urban uses. Forest use is better explained by shifting regional economic structure and hilly terrain. Counties with a greater proportion of their work force in the service sectors have a greater proportion of land forested. Finally, to some extent zoning may protect agricultural land in the region, although land rents, land characteristics, and population are strong predictors of the ratio of agriculture to urban use.     

Marginal Property Tax Effects of Conservation Easements: A Vermont Case Study

Conservation easements allow landowners to transfer their land's development rights to another entity, usually a nontaxable conservation organization. Conservation reduces the town's tax base, necessitating a tax rate increase to maintain service levels. However, conserving land also decreases the supply of developable land and provides open space amenities that may be capitalized into the value of nearby properties. These effects may offset the decrease in the tax base caused by the easement. Using a sample of twenty-nine Vermont towns, we show that private conservation easements increase property tax rates in the short run, but are tax-neutral or tax-suppressing in the long run.     

Patterns and drivers of recent agricultural land-use change in Southern Germany

Traditionally, agricultural land-use change (LUC) analyses focus on the conversion of natural land to agriculture especially in developing countries. Studies considering recent agricultural LUC (e.g., to built-up land) for the last two decades in more stable agricultural systems in Western Europe are mostly missing for the regional scale. Major LUC pathways, their drivers and potential counteracting factors such as subsidies or an increasing demand for regional agricultural products should be analyzed.Using the Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg in Germany, we quantified (i) major pathways of agricultural LUC with a transition matrix, and (ii) spatial patterns of agricultural LUC with optimized hot-spot analyses. (iii) We used boosted regression trees (BRT) to identify factors which foster agricultural LUC towards settlement and forest as well as semi-natural open land. Results for the last 15 years showed a considerable decline of agricultural land due to afforestation (3.1%) and due to settlement and infrastructure development (2.7%), which were the main LUC pathways. Both settlement development and afforestation concentrated at existing hotspots of urban development and in forest-dominated areas. Settlement-driven agricultural LUC was largely dependent on population density and development and independent from agricultural or biophysical parameters. Forest-driven LUC was mostly explained by agricultural parameters (i.e., low land rents and biophysical factors such as high slopes). Governance instruments such as regional planning and payments for maintaining agriculture on marginal land did not seem to maintain a balanced spatial distribution of agricultural land. If not improved, settlement development will considerably outcompete agriculture in prosperous sub-regions. Economic constraints will force farmers to abandon agriculture for forest on marginal locations at the cost of an intact cultural landscape.     

Land expansion and growth in low‐ and middle‐income countries*

Over past decades, low and middle‐income countries have experienced considerable expansion of agricultural land, yet this effect on growth has not been examined The following paper shows that the Solow‐Swan growth model can be extended to the case whereby arable land is expanding, as originally suggested by Solow (1956). This extension indicates that land expansion boosts growth, and this effect increases with the relative share of land in income. An empirical analysis over 1990–2018 for 138 low and middle‐income countries supports this finding. The growth impact of land expansion over 1990–2018 varied significantly across the sample of countries depending on how much income was derived from land. This result explains why countries dependent on agriculture have engaged in extensive land expansion: it boosts overall growth. However, these growth benefits must be weighed against the considerable environmental costs of converting forests and other natural habitat to more agricultural land, such as increased carbon emissions, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity, risk of disease, and impacts on local livelihoods.     

安徽省农地流转绩效差异分析

[目的]正确认识安徽省农地流转工作成果,剖析不同地区农地流转绩效差异,探讨有效提高农地流转绩效措施,对改革和完善农地政策具有重大现实意义。[方法]文章利用安徽省皖北、江淮和皖南3个区域农地流转情况调查数据和其他相关资料,运用层次分析法和模糊评价法构建农地流转绩效评价体系,综合分析农地流转绩效区域差异表现及原因。[结果]研究表明:(1)3个区域的农地流转绩效主要与区域内农村社会发展是否得到重视、农户家庭是否全面发展和流转工作是否落实有关,三者形成的合力最终导致综合绩效的差异;(2)农地流转绩效的提升是一项受多重因素影响的系统性工作,包括政策方针、经济发展和社会保障等方面。[结论]研究认为安徽省农地流转工作成果值得肯定,为进一步完善相关工作,建议综合协调各方资源,借鉴成功工作经验,大力发展地区经济、推广土地整治工作、加强农地经营权交易市场和社会保障体系建设。     

An Analysis of the Linkage Between Agricultural Exports and Economic Growth in Pakistan

Summary

This article examines the relationship between agricultural exports and economic growth. Pakistan is used as a case study due to its large amounts of agricultural exports which have competed with industry for government support. This study estimates three simultaneous equations representing GDP, agricultural exports, and total imports while incorporating factors such as income remittances from abroad, investment, and manufactured exports as independent variables. The timing of this information is critical as Pakistan's policy makers now face major agricultural reforms in their quest for development. The estimation results show that a favorable relationship exists between agricultural exports and growth in GDP.