Land use efficiency: anticipating future demand for land‐sector greenhouse gas emissions abatement and managing trade‐offs with agriculture, water, and biodiversity

Abstract

Competition for land is increasing, and policy needs to ensure the efficient supply of multiple ecosystem services from land systems. We modelled the spatially explicit potential future supply of ecosystem services in Australia's intensive agricultural land in response to carbon markets under four global outlooks from 2013 to 2050. We assessed the productive efficiency of greenhouse gas emissions abatement, agricultural production, water resources, and biodiversity services and compared these to production possibility frontiers (PPFs). While interacting commodity markets and carbon markets produced efficient outcomes for agricultural production and emissions abatement, more efficient outcomes were possible for water resources and biodiversity services due to weak price signals. However, when only two objectives were considered as per typical efficiency assessments, efficiency improvements involved significant unintended trade-offs for the other objectives and incurred substantial opportunity costs. Considering multiple objectives simultaneously enabled the identification of land use arrangements that were efficient over multiple ecosystem services. Efficient land use arrangements could be selected that meet society's preferences for ecosystem service provision from land by adjusting the metric used to combine multiple services. To effectively manage competition for land via land use efficiency, market incentives are needed that effectively price multiple ecosystem services.

Landscapes, at your service: applications of the Restoration Opportunities Optimization Tool (ROOT)

“…Though there are a few examples of quantitative trade-off analysis (e.g. Bryan et al, 2015;Bryan & Crossman, 2013), this typically leads to qualitative assessments of trade-offs in ecosystem services benefits, but it does not provide a spatially explicit quantitative assessment of these trade-offs, except when aggregated by administrative level. export to streams due to its detrimental effects on hydropower generation in Malawi.…”

Land Use Efficiency and Total Factor Productivity—Distribution Dynamic Evolution of Rural Living Space in Chongqing, China

“…On this basis, the relative efficiency of each decision-making unit can be calculated by building a directional distance function, which gives consideration to the increase in the "desirable" output and the possibility that the "undesirable" output is reduced at the same proportion. Therefore, the total factor land use rate of rural space subsystem of the undesirable output can be measured [31][32][33][34]. An aggregated specific land use efficiency total factor productivity with the consideration of undesirable outputs, for each decision-making unit at period t can then be obtained.…”

Mixed policies give more options in multifunctional tropical forest landscapes

“…; Bryan et al . , ). For more complex problems, heuristic methods such as genetic algorithms (Holzkämper & Seppelt ; Bekele et al .…”

“…Effective land-use planning provides an approach to resolve such tensions. However, weak governance and institutions mean that plans often meet the aspirations of only a subset of stakeholders, leading to dissatisfaction of some stakeholder groups (Bryan et al 2015).…”

“…PPF analyses thereby identify feasible, infeasible and optimal solutions, allowing evaluation of the compatibility of land-use targets expressed by multiple stakeholders. It also allows for the determination of opportunity costs of moving along or away from the Pareto-optimal frontier, thereby indicating the level of inefficiency present in current or proposed land-use configurations (Groeneveld 2003;Smith et al 2012;Bryan et al 2015).…”