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Environmental management and regional land use planning has become more complex in recent years as growing world population, climate change, carbon markets and government policies for sustainability have emerged. Reforestation and agroforestry options for environmental benefits, carbon sequestration, economic development and biodiversity conservation are now important considerations of land use planners. New information has been collected and regionally-calibrated models have been developed to facilitate better regional land use planning decisions and counter the limitations of currently available models of reforestation productivity and carbon sequestration. Surveys of above-ground biomass of 264 reforestation sites (132 woodlots, 132 environmental plantings) within the agricultural regions of South Australia were conducted, and combined with spatial information on climate and soils, to develop new spatial and temporal models of plant density and above-ground biomass productivity from reforestation. The models can be used to estimate productivity and total carbon sequestration (i.e. above-ground + below-ground biomass) under a continuous range of planting designs (e.g. variable proportions of trees and shrubs or plant densities), timeframes and future climate scenarios. Representative spatial models (1 ha resolution) for 3 reforestation designs (i.e. woodlots, typical environmental planting, biodiverse environmental plantings) × 3 timeframes (i.e. 25, 45, 65 years) × 4 possible climates (i.e. no change, mild, moderate, severe warming and drying) were generated (i.e. 36 scenarios) for use within land use planning tools., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Quantifying and mapping trans‐boundary ecosystem service (ES) flows can help identify dependencies and responsibilities for promoting economic development and environmental sustainability between nations, but few studies have focused on ES flows beyond national boundaries.Our case‐study region—Central Asia—hosts one of the largest dryland areas in the world, and this ecosystem is vulnerable to climate variability and anthropogenic impacts. Understanding ES supply, demand and flows is essential for supporting human wellbeing, livelihoods and economic development.In this study, we mapped the supply, demand and flows of four ES including freshwater provision, food provision, carbon sequestration and cultural (recreation) services between the five Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan for the year 2016. We quantified the spatial patterns in ES supply and demand at local and regional scales, driven by environmental heterogeneity and socio‐economic development, and revealed complex telecoupling of ES flows between nations. Kazakhstan provided the greatest amount of ES to other countries, especially food provision and carbon sequestration, while Uzbekistan was the biggest ES beneficiary, especially from freshwater and food provision services.Our analysis of trans‐boundary ES flows helps to understand the complex telecoupling and rich interdependencies between people and nature between different countries. This information is essential for policy making to balance human and ecological needs, enhance the management of natural capital, and sustain ES provision in our metacoupled world. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is having a significant impact on ecosystem services and is likely to become increasingly important as this phenomenon intensifies. Future impacts can be difficult to assess as they often involve long timescales, dynamic systems with high uncertainties, and are typically confounded by other drivers of change. Despite a growing literature on climate change impacts on ecosystem services, no quantitative syntheses exist. Hence, we lack an overarching understanding of the impacts of climate change, how they are being assessed, and the extent to which other drivers, uncertainties, and decision making are incorporated. To address this, we systematically reviewed the peer-reviewed literature that assesses climate change impacts on ecosystem services at subglobal scales. We found that the impact of climate change on most types of services was predominantly negative (59% negative, 24% mixed, 4% neutral, 13% positive), but varied across services, drivers, and assessment methods. Although uncertainty was usually incorporated, there were substantial gaps in the sources of uncertainty included, along with the methods used to incorporate them. We found that relatively few studies integrated decision making, and even fewer studies aimed to identify solutions that were robust to uncertainty. For management or policy to ensure the delivery of ecosystem services, integrated approaches that incorporate multiple drivers of change and account for multiple sources of uncertainty are needed. This is undoubtedly a challenging task, but ignoring these complexities can result in misleading assessments of the impacts of climate change, suboptimal management outcomes, and the inefficient allocation of resources for climate adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon sequestration from reforestation can play a large role in mitigating global climate change. However, resulting interception of rainfall runoff may impose high irrigation, water supply and/or environmental flow costs. This article presents an assessment of water trade policy to manage fresh water supply, carbon sequestration trade-offs for the Murray-Darling Basin. A linked Australian high spatial resolution land use and global integrated assessment framework evaluated plausible and internally-consistent global scenarios to 2050 involving significant carbon planting incentive. Substantial flow loss from increased interception was estimated absent policy to balance carbon water trade-offs. Absent policy to address the trade-off, irrigation opportunity costs was estimated to substantially exceed carbon sequestration economic value in futures with significant carbon sequestration incentive. The value of integrating interception from new carbon plantings into the existing water trade system was estimated at $3.3 billion and $2.0 billion (2050 annual value) for our strong and moderately strong global climate action outlooks with our reference case assumptions. The conclusion that trade provision in policy to cap interception impacts can produce significant benefits in scenarios with significant carbon sequestration incentive remained robust over a very broad set of sensitivities tested with benefit estimated at over $1 billion annually at 2050 even for very conservative assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing unsustainable natural resource use in agricultural landscapes is a complex social-ecological challenge that cannot be addressed through traditional reductionist science. More holistic and inclusive (or transdisciplinary) processes are needed. This paper describes a transdisciplinary project for natural resource management planning in two regions (Eyre Peninsula and South Australian Murray-Darling Basin) of southern Australia. With regional staff, we reviewed previous planning to gain an understanding of the processes used and to identify possible improvement in plan development and its operation. We then used an envisioning process to develop a value-rich narrative of regional aspirations to assist stakeholder engagement and inform the development of a land use management option assessment tool called the landscape futures analysis tool (LFAT). Finally, we undertook an assessment of the effectiveness of the process through semi-structured stakeholder interviews. The planning process review highlighted the opinion that the regional plans were not well informed by available science, that they lacked flexibility, and were only intermittently used after publication. The envisioning process identified shared values-generally described as a trust, language that is easily understood, wise use of resources, collaboration and inclusiveness. LFAT was designed to bring the best available science together in a form that would have use in planning, during community consultation and in assessing regional management operations. The LFAT provided spatially detailed but simple models of agricultural yields and incomes, plant biodiversity, weed distribution, and carbon sequestration associated with future combinations of climate, commodity and carbon prices, and costs of production. Stakeholders were impressed by the presentation and demonstration results of the software. While there was anecdotal evidence that the project provided learning opportunities and increased understanding of potential land use change associated with management options under global change, the direct evidence of influence in the updated regional plan was limited. This project had elements required for success in transdisciplinary research, but penetration seems limited. Contributing factors appear to be a complexity of climate effects with economic uncertainty, lack of having the project embedded in the plan revision process, limited continuity and capacity of end users and limited after project support and promotion. Strategies are required to minimise the controlling influence that these limitations can have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian agricultural land use and production have evolved within an economic and environmental context that may change substantially in terms of productivity rates, resource scarcity and degradation, greenhouse gas abatement policy, climate change, and global demand. We used an integrated systems modelling approach to explore the response of Australian land use and agricultural production to these changes from 2013 to 2050. We found potentially large transitions in spatial and temporal patterns of land use, agricultural production, output rates, and profitability. New land uses such as carbon plantings, biofuels and bioenergy, and environmental plantings competed with food and fibre production, reducing its area. Global outlooks, including the strength of action on climate change and population assumptions, had a strong influence. Capacity constraints and adoption inertia reduced and delayed land use change. Agricultural production and land use were sensitive to productivity assumptions. Despite the competition for land from new land uses, agricultural production increased under most settings, with greatest impact from land use transitions concentrated on livestock production. Agricultural profits also increased under most settings due to higher prices and output rates. Negligible land use change was observed with carbon payments below $50 per tCO 2 -e, and significant change did not occur before 2030 in any but the unconstrained, high-abatement scenarios. We conclude that transformative land use change is plausible but high levels of food/fibre production can co-exist with non-food land uses motivated by market responses to global change and domestic policy. Thereby, the Australian land sector can continue its significant contribution to global food security while responding to new economic opportunities. Policy settings can influence these outcomes through reducing infrastructure constraints, strategies for enhancing adoption, and research and development in agricultural technology and productivity. Due to the long time frames required to change attitudes and land use and management practices, consideration of the possible impacts of global change on agriculture and potential policy responses is timely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifying soil organic carbon ( SOC) dynamics at a high spatial and temporal resolution in response to different agricultural management practices and environmental conditions can help identify practices that both sequester carbon in the soil and sustain agricultural productivity. Using an agricultural systems model (the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator), we conducted a high spatial resolution and long-term (122 years) simulation study to identify the key management practices and environmental variables influencing SOC dynamics in a continuous wheat cropping system in Australia's 96 million ha cereal-growing regions. Agricultural practices included five nitrogen application rates (0-200 kg N ha−1 in 50 kg N ha−1 increments), five residue removal rates (0-100% in 25% increments), and five residue incorporation rates (0-100% in 25% increments). We found that the change in SOC during the 122-year simulation was influenced by the management practices of residue removal (linearly negative) and fertilization (nonlinearly positive) - and the environmental variables of initial SOC content (linearly negative) and temperature (nonlinearly negative). The effects of fertilization were strongest at rates up to 50 kg N ha−1, and the effects of temperature were strongest where mean annual temperatures exceeded 19 °C. Reducing residue removal and increasing fertilization increased SOC in most areas except Queensland where high rates of SOC decomposition caused by high temperature and soil moisture negated these benefits. Management practices were particularly effective in increasing SOC in south-west Western Australia - an area with low initial SOC. The results can help target agricultural management practices for increasing SOC in the context of local environmental conditions, enabling farmers to contribute to climate change mitigation and sustaining agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Social costs of CO 2 emissions from forest cover change were projected from 2015 to 2050. • By 2030, deforestation was almost one-third less than reforestation. • CO 2 emissions from deforestation were double the sequestration from forest gains. • Social costs of carbon from forest loss were five times the benefits from forest gains. • Asymmetries in social costs and benefits decreased over time but persisted to 2050. Forest cover gains and losses occur in response to complex environmental and anthropogenic pressures. Yet the impact of forest gains and losses on the provision of ecosystem services differs markedly. Here we investigate the social costs of potential forest carbon change in Australia's intensive agricultural region from 2015 to 2050 using spatial forest cover change and forest carbon models combined with climate and socioeconomic projections. More than 24,000 possible scenarios were used to identify the trend and lower and upper bounds of forest cover/carbon change. Net deforestation (3.5 million hectares, Mha) under the lower bound forest cover (LBFC) projection was around one-third less than net reforestation (4.8 Mha) under the upper bound forest cover (UBFC) projection by 2030. However, the CO 2 emissions (1.3 Gigatons of CO 2 , GtCO 2) from deforestation were more than double the sequestration (0.5 GtCO 2) from reforestation. The social costs (up to 134 billion dollars) of the LBFC were almost five times the benefits of the UBFC (up to 28 billion dollars). The asymmetry decreased over time but persisted to 2050. This shows the markedly different social costs of potential forest carbon losses and gains under global change, evidence which can be useful to policymakers, stakeholders, and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]