Resilient Provision of Ecosystem Services from Agricultural Landscapes: Trade-offs Involving Means and Variances of Water Quality Improvements

• Published in: American journal of agricultural economics 2016-10, Vol.98 (5), p.1295-1313
• Main Authors: Rabotyagov, Sergey S., Valcu-Lisman, Adriana M., Kling, Catherine L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agricultural conservation; Agricultural conservation practices; Agricultural economics; Agricultural ecosystems; Agricultural land; agricultural nonpoint‐source pollution; Agricultural practices; Agriculture; ASSA Meeting Invited Papers; Conservation; Conservation practices; Ecosystem services; ecosystem services trade‐offs; Ecosystems; evolutionary algorithms; Investments; Landscape; Loads (forces); Marginal costs; multiobjective optimization; Nutrient loading; Quality assessment; Resilience; safety first; Water quality; Water quality assessments
• ISSN: 0002-9092; 1467-8276
• DOI: 10.1093/ajae/aaw068

We assess the trade-offs and synergies involved in reducing agriculture-generated nutrient loads with different levels of resilience. We optimize the selection of least-cost patterns of agricultural conservation practices for both the expected performance of the conservation actions and its variance. Securing nutrient loads with a higher level of resilience is costly, with marginal costs of resilience generally declining with lower loads. We find that the main trade-off dimension is between cost of conservation investments and ecosystem service objectives, as opposed to pronounced mean-variance or between-nutrient objectives trade-offs. We find relative synergies in agricultural conservation investments aimed at nutrient reductions.