Changing agricultural land use: evaluating the benefits and trade-offs

Changing the mix of land uses in agricultural systems affects the benefits enjoyed by humans. Such benefits range from food and water to aesthetic and spiritual benefits. If one aim of land-use decision-making is to maintain or improve the quality of human lives, the consequences of proposed changes must be evaluated across all benefits that contribute to human well-being. This is a challenging task. Difficulties include classifying benefits to minimise double-counting, objective quantification of disparate benefits, and the costs of analyses. The reported work addresses these issues by testing a new classification of benefits and using expert elicitation to reduce assessment costs. Compared to current agricultural systems, the impacts of the two perennial plant technologies assessed were generally either neutral or positive with respect to the flow of benefits. At low cost, the benefits analysis informs stakeholders of the impacts of proposed land-use changes and the breadth of issues that need to be con...