“Land of Confusion”: the socioeconomic impact of tourism-driven land price increases in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Is forestry really more profitable than upland farming? A historic and present day farm level economic comparison of upland sheep farming and forestry in the UK

Rising agricultural water scarcity in China is driven by expansion of irrigated cropland in water scarce regions

Assessment of land dynamics transformation into tea plantations using support vector machine

Environmental protection and poverty reduction are central issues in United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Both aspects have special importance in the Andes biodiversity hot spot where high rates of deforestation overlap with high levels of poverty. Peasant households use forest land as cheap means of production to increase their agricultural area in order to maintain or increase their income. Respect to the issues mentioned above, following research questions are relevant: i) What are the opportunity costs of the farming households to conserve the native Andes forest?, a production function approach was used to calculate the profitability and determinants of agricultural production. ii) Is current agricultural production working efficiently?, a stochastic frontier analysis was used to calculate technical efficiency and its determinants in the cattle production. Futhermore, iii) What is the best conservation instrument in order to achieve cost-efficiency and poverty alleviation?, different conservation instruments fostering a forest conversion ban, including payments for ecosystem services schemes, on cost-efficiency and poverty alleviation were also tested. In order to apply economic models, a socioeconomic sample of 130 households was collected during the farming season 2008 in the area of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Podocarpus - El Condor , south Ecuador. The most profitable land use found is extensive pasture-based cattle production (net profit 159 USD/ha/yr in average) with huge heterogeneity among households. Factors influencing the gross margin and consequently profitability in cattle production are land size, labor, input expenses, ethnicity, altitude and access to technical assistance and formal credits. The production frontier models revealed that size of pasture, labor and costs of production monotonically have increased cattle production in the sampled farms. Also, the technical inefficiency model shows that the location of the farms (lowland), ethnicity (Mestizo ethnic) and accessibility of technical assistance increased the technical efficiency of cattle farms in the study area. The average technical efficiency of about 70% was obtained from the analysis which implies a technical inefficiency level of about 30%. Of course such inefficiency could be reduced or minimized by providing technical assistance. The design of payment and contract attributes has a pronounced impact on the effectiveness as well as on the distributional impact of PES-type conservation instruments. Voluntary conservation payment instruments tend to be more cost-efficient than mandatory ones, if competitively low payments are offered. Such low offers are incompatible with poverty alleviation goals. Pronounced pro poor distributional impacts are possible, however, but the PES contracts will rather need higher payments per unit area (up to 300 USD/ha/yr) and need to be offered exclusively to the poorest households.

Economic growth in rural areas has to align with preservation of land uses that optimise environmental services. This means that trade-offs between economic and ecological priorities need to be understood, quantified and managed. We aimed to estimate the trade-off in the Tanjung Jabung Barat district of Jambi province Indonesia, where traditional agroforestry systems on both peat and mineral soils and logged-over forests give way to monocultural plantations of pulpwood and oil palm (Elaeis guineensis). Simulations of a 30-year time period of four scenarios using the FALLOW (Forests, Agroforests, Low-value-Landscape, Or, Wastelands) model show that a business-as-usual scenario of economic growth unhindered by the application of conservation scenarios will lead to high carbon dioxide CO2 emissions. The forest and agroforest protection scenario, with moderate assumptions for peat-based emissions, had opportunity costs of 3–100 USD/t CO2e. This occurred especially when the establishment of oil palm plantations, which are currently the most profitable land use option in the area, is directed solely to under utilized mineral soils. The high trade-off values are difficult to reconcile when relying only on C trading mechanism to offset economic opportunity costs of not converting forests and/or agroforests to plantations. We conclude that law-based protection of existing forests, investment in intermediate intensity agroforestry options that utilize locally adapted trees and do not require drainage of peatlands, and re-introduction of tapping Jelutung (Dyera sp) latex as non-timber peat forest product, are needed in the Tanjabar district to provide options that are sustainable from both ecological and economic perspectives.

Sweden has recently decided to ratify the European Landscape Convention (ELC). Methods for implementation have been discussed for both the ELC and related national environmental objectives. Thus, the Swedish Government decided that seven County Administrative Boards should undertake pilot studies for Regional Landscape Strategies (RLS) during 2006–2007. The RLS pilot projects aimed at a new and more effective approach for conservation and sustainable land use at regional level. Additionally, RLS should also function as a method for implementing the ELC and other environmental objectives. One specific focus of the pilot studies was on developing methods for public participation. Other important issues were to involve different administrative sectors, municipalities, and regional authorities in the process, as well as attaining a good balance between conservation and profitable land use. This chapter presents some of the results from the RLS case study in Vellinge municipality, Scania (Skåne), Sweden’s southernmost province. The focus of the study was on public participation in particular by equestrians and landowners. The first ‘bridleway organization’ of its kind in Sweden was established as a direct result of the project.KeywordsRegional Landscape StrategiesPublic ParticipationEuropean Landscape ConventionStakeholdersMultifunctional GreenwaysGreenway PlanningMunicipal Planning (Sweden)BridlewaysEquestriansLandowners

In this paper we developed a combination of aggregation-disaggregation technique with the concept of column generation to solve a large scale LP problem originating from land use management in the Australian agricultural sector. The problem is to optimally allocate the most profitable land use activities including agriculture, carbon sequestration, environmental planting, bio-fuel, bio-energy, etc., and is constrained to satisfy some food demand considerations and expansion policies for each year from 2013 to 2050. In this research we produce a higher resolution solution by dividing Australia’s agricultural areas into square kilometer cells, which leads to more than thirteen million cells to be assigned, totally or partially, to different activities. By accepting a scenario on agricultural products’ return, carbon related activities, future energy prices, water availability, global climate change, etc. a linear programming problem is composed for each year. However, even by using a state of the art commercial LP solver it takes a long time to find an optimal solution for one year. Therefore, it is almost impossible to think about simultaneous scenarios to be incorporated, as the corresponding model will become even larger. Based on the properties of the problem, such as similar economical and geographical properties of nearby land parcels, the combination of clustering ideas with column generation to decompose the large problem into smaller sub-problems yields a computationally efficient algorithm for the large scale problem.

Impacts of long-term jujube tree/winter wheat–summer maize intercropping on soil fertility and economic efficiency—A case study in the lower North China Plain

The objective of this programme is to provide farm foresters and others with knowledge about sustainable and profitable land use with commercial tree crops. Initially the study examined the role of trees in stabilising soils when planted on eroding hill country pasture. Three species - radiata pine, Douglas-fir, and poplar - were compared for effects in reducing erosion. Tree size, tree stocking per hectare, root tensile strength, and rate of decay of roots after harvest were found to be important. Erosion control becomes effective once a stand of trees reached the equivalent of 30 tonnes/ha of radiata pine root biomass. Silviculture, and choice of species, determines to what extent this critical threshold is achieved. Decision support software, developed in this programme as "calculators', estimate the 'Equivalent Farming Gross Margin' of crops of radiata pine, and Douglas-fir, compared to the livestock previously grazing the land. The calculators, which run under Microsoft EXCELTM, also allow the identification of the most profitable silviculture for the tree crop, and generate yield tables. The calculators are being applied in two case studies; the first involves calibrating the radiata pine calculator for Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa against actual tree data. Calibration of the calculator for bare land is also being studied. The second study will investigate how well tree crops can compete financially with pastoral farming systems in the Lake Taupo catchment, where there are increasing concerns about nutrient in-flows from pastoral farming. Further enhancements of the calculators are planned which will permit calibration against younger stands, and evaluation of a much wider range of silviculture. Keywords: farm forestry, erosion, root biomass, root strength, financial return, IRR, PNW, farming gross margin, Pinus radiata, Douglas-fir, poplar

Abstract. Loss of environmental services provided by forests is a non-linear process in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. Intermediate-intensity land-use types in the form of complex agroforests have maintained global environmental benefits under a sustainable and profitable land use regime. Conversion to tree crop monocultures, however, poses a challenge to the environmental stakeholders and an opportunity from to stakeholders in the private economy. We quantified environmental indicators, as well as profitability and sustainability of a range of existing and possible production systems. Criteria and indicators were used at plot to landscape scales, taking into account local, national and global perspectives. Agronomic sustainability and profitability were assessed at plot level as they are of primarily local concern, while environmental services of forests, such as plant species and functional type richness, carbon stocks, greenhouse gas emissions, and trans-boundary haze, which are of national and global concern, were assessed at landscape level. Quantitative trade-offs and complementarities were analysed between global environmental benefits and local profitability. The current trend towards simplification of the complex agro-ecosystems and inherent loss of environmental services of forests is driven by profitability. The sequence in which environmental services of forests are lost is: standing carbon stocks, biodiversity, and low or negative greenhouse gas emissions.

The core of this paper consists of an analysis of the forces and conducive conditions which historically have driven the drainage development of agricultural land. Such forces and conditions are recognised at three levels of discretion: (i) the generic level (ii) the government level (iii) the on‐farm level. The drainage development for salinity control of irrigated land in the (semi) arid zone is treated as a special case of drainage development driven by its own specific forces and considerations. Relevant comparisons have also been made with the development and adoption of other agricultural technologies such as farm mechanisation the seed–fertiliser package and irrigation. It is concluded that drainage development in regular rainfed agricultural land is primarily driven by its (farm) economic utility as an instrument for achieving more profitable land use and for overcoming constraints to further agricultural development. For drainage development to become a priority the level of agricultural development must generally have passed the threshold level at which the prevailing drainage conditions of the land have become a critical constraint to higher yields crop choice and efficient farm operations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The inclusion of perennial pasture phases in cropping rotations has been widely promoted throughout Australia for reducing the incidence of dryland salinity. To a lesser extent, they have also been promoted to enhance the management of herbicide‐resistant weeds. No previous economic analysis of perennial pasture has considered both of these benefits. This study combines a dynamic linear programming model to estimate the magnitude of salinity‐related benefits and a complex simulation model to assess the economics of herbicide‐resistance management. We present a case study of the perennial pasture lucerne (Medicago sativa L.) in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, where the weed annual ryegrass (Lolium rigidum Gaudin) is resistant to multiple herbicide groups. Sequences incorporating lucerne are the most profitable land use at the standard set of parameter values if (i) annual ryegrass is resistant to all selective herbicides, (ii) the water table is so shallow (approximately < 3.5 m deep) that frequent rotation with perennials is required to avert soil salinisation, (iii) sheep production is highly profitable, or (iv) there is a combination of less extreme cases. The value of perennial pasture is sufficient under these circumstances to overcome its high establishment cost and the displacement of multiple years of crop. Consideration of dryland salinity and herbicide resistance are about equally important in evaluating the economics of lucerne; neither should be neglected.

How attractive are short-term CDM forestations in arid regions? The case of irrigated croplands in Uzbekistan

This special issue features papers contributed by presenters at the 12th North American Agroforestry Conference held June 4–9, 2011 in Athens, Georgia, USA. The conference brought together agroforestry researchers, educators, practitioners, and students to highlight agroforestry research, implementation, policy, education, and entrepreneurial opportunities across North America. Eight papers cover topics ranging from adoption of silvopastoral systems across eco-regions and countries; economics of pine straw production; and timber and alley crop production in the Southeastern U.S.; reduction of sublimation of snow with shelterbelts in Canada, carbon offset incentives for agroforestry practices; consumer and market dynamics for chestnut and elderberry specialty crops; and web-based graduate degree and certificate programs in agroforestry.

Abstract. Loss of environmental services provided by forests is a non‐linear process in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. Intermediate‐intensity land‐use types in the form of complex agroforests have maintained global environmental benefits under a sustainable and profitable land use regime. Conversion to tree crop monocultures, however, poses a challenge to the environmental stakeholders and an opportunity from to stakeholders in the private economy. We quantified environmental indicators, as well as profitability and sustainability of a range of existing and possible production systems. Criteria and indicators were used at plot to landscape scales, taking into account local, national and global perspectives. Agronomic sustainability and profitability were assessed at plot level as they are of primarily local concern, while environmental services of forests, such as plant species and functional type richness, carbon stocks, greenhouse gas emissions, and trans‐boundary haze, which are of national and global concern, were assessed at landscape level. Quantitative trade‐offs and complementarities were analysed between global environmental benefits and local profitability. The current trend towards simplification of the complex agro‐ecosystems and inherent loss of environmental services of forests is driven by profitability. The sequence in which environmental services of forests are lost is: standing carbon stocks, biodiversity, and low or negative greenhouse gas emissions.