Abstract
An effective implementation of payment for environmental services (PES) must allow for complex interactions of coupled social-ecological systems. We present an integrative study of the pasture-woodland landscape of the Swiss Jura Mountains combining methods from natural and social sciences to explore feedback between vegetation dynamics on paddock level, farm-based decision making, and policy decisions on the national political level. Our modeling results show that concomitant climatic and socioeconomic changes advance the loss of open grassland in silvopastoral landscapes. This would, in the longer term, deteriorate the historical wooded pastures in the region, which fulfill important functions for biodiversity and are widely considered as landscapes that deserve protection. Payment for environmental services could counteract this development while respecting historical land-use and ecological boundary conditions. The assessed policy feedback process reveals that current policy processes may hinder the implementation of PES, even though a payment for the upkeep of wooded pasture would generally enjoy the backing of the relevant policy network. To effectively support the upkeep of the wooded pastures in the Jura, concomitant policy changes, such as market deregulation, must also be taken into account.
Highlights
Payments for environmental services (PES) are seen as one of the key mechanisms to regulate the use of ecosystem goods and services (EGS) by translating external, nonmarket values of the environment into financial incentives for local actors (MEA 2005, Engel et al 2008, Sommerville et al 2009)
We present an integrative study of the pasture-woodland landscape of the Swiss Jura Mountains combining methods from natural and social sciences to explore feedback between vegetation dynamics on paddock level, farm-based decision making, and policy decisions on the national political level
We focus on two key interrelated feedback loops: (1) a primary feedback loop between aggregated landuse allocation at farm level and the potential fodder supply of the pasture-woodland landscape; (2) a secondary, yet policymediated feedback that links the long-term and qualitative changes in pasture-woodland to specific policy options and their political feasibility given the current Swiss agricultural policy network
Summary
Payments for environmental services (PES) are seen as one of the key mechanisms to regulate the use of ecosystem goods and services (EGS) by translating external, nonmarket values of the environment into financial incentives for local actors (MEA 2005, Engel et al 2008, Sommerville et al 2009). There exists a tradition of different frameworks on how to address such complex interactions (Folke 2006, Liu et al 2007, Daily et al 2009, Ostrom 2009, Alberti et al 2011, Collins et al 2011, Scholz 2011). All these frameworks refer to inter- and transdisciplinary research as the key to overcome fundamental problems in the analysis of such complex systems. Thereby, an explicit consideration of reciprocal feedback effects from changing socioeconomic and political conditions on ecological system changes, e.g., climate change, is an important task in interdisciplinary research (Cumming et al 2006, Steffen 2009, Müller et al 2010)
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