Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

Abstract

Urbanization pressure increases the demand on remaining open spaces to deliver food and biomass, as well as other ecosystem services, but it is often paired with a reduced capacity to deliver these services. This calls for an integrated and innovative use of the remaining space.However, current spatial planning paradigms are not always adapted to face these new challenges. In many regions, an important aspect of spatial planning in relation to agriculture is still the pragmatic and monofunctional allocation of land use between vocal stakeholders. This is rarely paired with a regional view on the effective or desired quantity of services provided by this open space. Since land use policies increasingly need to strive for resilience on top of diversification of services, assessments of the servicing capacity and sustainability of land uses are needed.This paper presents a framework to assess all ecosystem services (i.e. marketable and non-marketable ES) delivered by conventional as well as innovative land uses. The framework is then used to assess land use strategies at the scale of an unconventional case farm in Flanders, Belgium. The analysis combines spatial and economic analysis of land use alternatives and illustrates some shortcomings of usual ecosystem valuation tools. Our findings illustrate that land use evaluation might be biased against unconventional land management alternatives. The proposed framework provides land planners with a way to assess and arbitrate between land sharing and land sparring options more accurately. The approach can help to optimize land use from the societal perspective, and allows for benchmarking farm-level land use alternatives by comparing the services they deliver.