Farming in a changing environment: Increasing biodiversity on farm for the supply of multiple ecosystem services

Dominati, Estelle; Maseyk, Fleur J. F.; Mackay, A.D.; Rendel, J.M.

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.01.268

Cited by 45 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…However, the effectiveness of incentives to change individual behaviours depends in part on the strength of incentive that an individual needs to change and the relative advantage they can see in adopting the behaviour (Pannell 2004;Pannell et al 2006). Increasing the understanding of the value of biodiversity to the farm system and maintaining profitability (Dominati et al 2019) will help shift perceptions towards biodiversity from a 'nice to have' to an investment that makes good business sense. Resourcing invested by councils and industry groups to build on this momentum will make a valuable contribution to improving biodiversity stewardship on-farm.…”

Section: Overcoming Financial Barriersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Native biodiversity is important not just from intrinsic conservation and cultural perspectives, but also for the long-term sustainability and resilience of farm systems and for sustaining the provision of the full range of ecosystem services (Norton & Reid 2013;Dominati et al 2019;Maseyk et al 2019). The continued decline of our natural capital, including native biodiversity (Brown et al 2015;Boston 2018; Ministry for the Environment & Stats NZ 2018) poses a fundamental challenge for New Zealand.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Managing and protecting native biodiversity on-farm – what do sheep and beef farmers think?

Maseyk¹,

Small²,

Henwood³

et al. 2021

NZJE

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Despite one-third of New Zealand's landmass being protected as public conservation land, the country still faces significant conservation challenges. Nearly 50% of the country's landmass has been converted to pastoral farming, and biological invasions pose a sustained and growing threat to remaining biodiversity across all land tenures. Managing and protecting biodiversity on-farm provides vast opportunities to create nature-rich pastoral landscapes. A key step towards bringing about necessary behaviour change to achieve this is increasing insights into farmers' attitudes towards the value of native biodiversity on their farms. Using a questionnaire underpinned by the Theory of Planned Behaviour, we surveyed 500 sheep and beef farmers from around New Zealand as to their beliefs and attitudes and perceived barriers relating to the protection and management of native biodiversity on their farm. Although the survey respondents were largely homogenous, the surveyed group of farmers were heterogeneous in their responses. When asked about advantages associated with managing and protecting native biodiversity on their farms, 690 distinct responses were provided, spanning social (47%), environmental (34%), practical (10%), and economic (2%) themes. In contrast, identified disadvantages were fewer (530 distinct responses) and less wide-ranging in scope, clustering around economic (44%), practical (26%) and social (25%) themes. Nearly three times as many farmers stated there were no disadvantages (22%) than stated there were no advantages (8%). However, the most frequently cited disadvantages were cost and time, which were also commonly cited as barriers to managing biodiversity. Our study illustrates that sheep and beef farmers perceive may advantages in maintaining native biodiversity on-farm, but there is a clear desire for greater support in overcoming identified barriers and this will require a targeted policy response.

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Section: Overcoming Financial Barriersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing and protecting native biodiversity on-farm – what do sheep and beef farmers think?

Maseyk¹,

Small²,

Henwood³

et al. 2021

NZJE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such instrumental values often are also labelled as 'ecosystem services' (e.g. Dominati et al, 2019). Aesthetic values relate to the assigned aesthetic quality of rural areas.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The decline in agrobiodiversity is considered problematic because it is a problem in itself, but also because of an underutilization of the potential ecosystem services that agrobiodiversity can deliver (Dominati, Maseyk, Mackay, & Rendel, 2019). Finally, biodiversity loss is only one of the indicators of unsustainable farming practices, next to risks for human health degrading nature's life support systems for future generations (Whitmee et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The power of argument

Runhaar

Bouwmans

et al. 2019

International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability

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Agrobiodiversity has been decreasing substantially in Europe. Social scientific research in this area has paid limited attention to how citizens value agrobiodiversity and its decline, and how these valuations can be influenced. We explore the influence of different arguments for enhancing agro-biodiversity, delivered via short movies, on attitudes and behaviour of students, environmental professionals and people interested in nature conservation in the Netherlands. We conclude that information provision does not influence attitudes. However, it does influence values assigned to agrobiodiversity, but not always in the ways we hypothesized. Information about the intrinsic value of agrobiodiversity has the most effects on values assigned to agrobiodiversity. Among students, women and people with a low emotional attachment with agricultural landscapes ('place identity' and 'place dependence'), emphasizing the instrumental value of agrobiodiversity has a counter-intuitive effect. It does not influence the importance of this value but instead reinforces the intrinsic value they assign to agrobiodiversity. The latter finding is at odds with the instrumental biodiversity discourse in science and policy, which, under headings such as ecosystem services and natural capital, aims to mobilize support for nature conservation by emphasizing its instrumental, functional and economic values. Emphasizing the intrinsic value of agrobiodiversity seems more effective.

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“…Enhancing ecosystem function on-farm will also require increasing structural diversity through the re-introduction of indigenous species (Dominati et al 2019). Increased structural diversity has the potential to reduce the risk of soil loss and emissions to water and air and improve on-farm resilience to the impacts of severe weather events by increasing the ability to buffer wind, reduce the volume and velocity of overland water flow, and retain soils on erosion-prone slopes as well as increase biodiversity values on-farm (Dominati et al 2014(Dominati et al , 2019. Farm resilience is both the ability to withstand disturbances of greater severity (resistance) and the ability to recover from disturbances when they do impact (see glossary).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than a ‘nice to have’: integrating indigenous biodiversity into agroecosystems in New Zealand

Maseyk¹,

Dominati²,

Mackay³

et al. 2019

NZJE

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Globally, biodiversity is declining due to increasing populations and land use pressures associated with development-induced land conversion, resource use, and food production. In New Zealand, a considerable proportion of remaining indigenous biodiversity occurs on farmland in private ownership outside of the public conservation land. Therefore, coordinated actions on-farm are required to increase the opportunities to achieve biodiversity outcomes beyond the boundaries of the protected area network and increase farm sustainability and resilience. Increasing biodiversity on-farm can be achieved by enhancing existing biodiversity or through reintroducing structural diversity (e.g. planting of indigenous species and excluding livestock to prevent treading and grazing and allow natural regeneration to occur). Successful integration of biodiversity into decisionmaking on-farm requires explicitly accounting for biodiversity considerations in farm planning and design. A key requirement for this integration to succeed is for current land evaluation and farm planning processes to recognise indigenous species as a mechanism for increasing the sustainability and resilience of the farm business. Recognition of the functional value of biodiversity to the farm system is a step beyond the protection of remnant areas of bush or wetland for conservation alone. In this paper, we propose embedding the natural capital and ecosystem services approach into the farm planning process to quantify and value both the on-and off-farm benefits associated with indigenous biodiversity. This approach enables the inclusion of the previously excluded regulating and cultural services alongside provisioning services in the analysis of the farm accounts. Learning from and applying Matauranga Maori is pivotal to achieving this goal. We use the established principles of land evaluation in farm planning in New Zealand to provide a conceptual illustration of a potential pathway to operationalise this shift. Our approach recognises that indigenous biodiversity contributes to a wide range of benefits including cultural, environmental, social, and economic values, of which conservation is just one, albeit an important, outcome.

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Farming in a changing environment: Increasing biodiversity on farm for the supply of multiple ecosystem services

Cited by 45 publications

References 39 publications

Managing and protecting native biodiversity on-farm – what do sheep and beef farmers think?

Managing and protecting native biodiversity on-farm – what do sheep and beef farmers think?

The power of argument

More than a ‘nice to have’: integrating indigenous biodiversity into agroecosystems in New Zealand

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