Abstract
Land-use change has a significant impact on the world's ecosystems. Changes in the extent and composition of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems have large impacts on the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and returns to landowners. While the change in private returns to landowners due to land-use change can often be measured, changes in the supply and value of ecosystem services and the provision of biodiversity conservation have been harder to quantify. In this paper we use a spatially explicit integrated modeling tool (InVEST) to quantify the changes in ecosystem services, habitat for biodiversity, and returns to landowners from land-use change in Minnesota from 1992 to 2001. We evaluate the impact of actual land-use change and a suite of alternative land-use change scenarios. We find a lack of concordance in the ranking of baseline and alternative land-use scenarios in terms of generation of private returns to landowners and net social benefits (private returns plus ecosystem service value). Returns to landowners are highest in a scenario with large-scale agricultural expansion. This scenario, however, generated the lowest net social benefits across all scenarios considered because of large losses in stored carbon and negative impacts on water quality. Further, this scenario resulted in the largest decline in habitat quality for general terrestrial biodiversity and forest songbirds. Our results illustrate the importance of taking ecosystem services into account in land-use and land-management decision-making and linking such decisions to incentives that accurately reflect social returns.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 219-242 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Environmental and Resource Economics |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2011 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgments The authors thank two referees, seminar participants at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Society for Conservation Biology, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and the Fourth World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists in Montreal for helpful comments. We thank Dave Helmers, University of Wisconsin, for help with preparing maps of Minnesota data; Cinzia Fissore, University of Minnesota, for help with carbon storage steady-state values; Driss Ennaanay and Stacie Wolny, The Natural Capital Project, for help with running the InVEST water pollution model; Nasser Olwero, World Wildlife Fund—US, for help with running the InVEST biodiversity model; Grant Domke, University of Minnesota, for information on forestry in Minnesota, and Aaron Spence, Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, for providing us with crop yield data for Minnesota from SSURGO. This project was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Grant (No. 0814628), and a Discovery Grant from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.
Keywords
- Biodiversity
- Ecosystem services
- Land use
- Net social benefits
- Private returns to landowners
- Tradeoffs
