Abstract
Environmental services of biodiversity, clean water, etc., have been considered byproducts of farming and grazing, but population pressures and a move from rural to peri-urban areas are changing land use practices, reducing these services and increasing land degradation. A range of ecosystem markets have been reversing this damage, but these are not widely institutionalized, so land managers do not see them as “real” in the way they do for traditional food and fiber products. There are difficulties defining and monitoring non-food/fiber ecosystem services so they can be reliably marketed, and those markets that do operate usually do so in a piecemeal single product way in the interest of simplicity for the buyer, and seldom adequately regulate or compensate land managers for non-market benefits. New profitable uses of degraded water and regenerating land are emerging, but they require technology transfer or supply chain development to facilitate adoption. There is a need for a transformational change in the way land and water are used to promote a broader approach, so environmental services become a mainstream activity for land managers. A far-sighted Philanthropist is required to support an International institution to take up the challenge of institutionalizing such a ‘brokerage’ system to operate globally.
Highlights
There are many varieties of these essentially adaptive management protocols, often collectively referred to as “participatory approaches”, but they remain contested with some traditional planners as the cost and time for implementation remain as uncertain as the outcomes, and they may still not allow for the impact of short project and political cycles [28,29]
Five distinct land uses were agreed on for the studied area of Qinzhou prefecture in Southern China and the services from near natural land uses, grazing land and woodland/forest land had significant benefits at the catchment level, while tree and investments to be ranked according to global, national, catchment or local lev facilitates the “brokering” and monitoring of services [61] by land managers to m interested in specific ecosystem outcomes at these different scales
The rapid movement of people from rural to urban areas increases the pressure on rural areas to produce more food and fiber, for which conventional supply chains and financing already function quite well
Summary
Farming has traditionally been an individual, family or corporate endeavor aimed at profit or food production. The resulting flow of polluted storm or other drainage waters from urban to perisuch as salts, heavy metals, biologically active chemicals, and nutrients, having attendant urban and rural areas often contains pollutants such as salts, heavy metals, biologihealth and eutrophication impacts on the rural land it may be draining to This creates a cally active chemicals, and nutrients, having attendant health and eutrophication imsignificant need for restoration that can seldom be paid for by the land manager or farmer pacts on the rural land it may be draining to. Investments in conservation, restoration and sustainable ecosystems use are increasingly seen as a “win-win situation” that generates substantial ecological, social, and economic benefit, but the distribution of benefits and the apportionment of costs and rewards are not often skewed in favor of the land user These efforts may have been successful in terms of generating environmental benefits, very few provide the range of goods and services once provided by the original ecosystems or even the degraded systems that were replaced [8]. From the perspective of land managers, there are at least three factors inhibiting action: The delay between the investment and the benefit stream as new techniques such as perennial halophytes become established or soil or landform treatments take effect; Many of the benefits such as biodiversity enhancement, carbon sequestration, etc., are not, or are only partially useful, to the land manager; There is often significant technical complexity and/or a need to access new plants for land regeneration, requiring technical assistance and demonstration for success
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