Conference Agenda

Land use change is crucial to addressing the existential threats of climate change and biodiversity loss while enhancing food security(1). However, the interconnected and spatially varying nature of the impacts of land use change means that these challenges must be addressed simultaneously(2). Despite this, governments around the world commonly focus on single issues, incentivizing land use change via ‘Flat-Rate’ subsidies offering constant per hectare payments, uptake of which is determined by the economic circumstances of landowners rather than the integrated environmental outcomes that will be delivered(3). Here we compare this common approach to allocating subsidies to two increasingly popular alternatives: ‘Land Use Scenario’ allocation of subsidies through consultation across stakeholders and interested parties; and a ‘Natural Capital’ approach which targets subsidies according to expected ecosystem service response. A comparison of outcomes across the three approaches is achieved by developing a novel and comprehensive decision support system, integrating new and existing natural, physical and economic science models to quantify environmental, agricultural and economic outcomes. Applying this system to the UK net zero commitment to increase carbon storage via afforestation, we show that the three approaches result in significantly different outcomes in terms of where planting occurs, their environmental consequences, and economic costs and benefits. Analysis reveals that the dominant Flat-Rate approach actually increases net carbon emissions while Land Use Scenario allocation of subsidies yield poor economic outcomes. In contrast, the Natural Capital targeted approach outperforms both of these alternatives, providing the highest possible social values while satisfying net zero commitments.

Continued economic growth requires development to mitigate its negative environmental impacts. Increasingly, regulation for “no-net-loss” policies are in place to ensure it does. Yet, the mechanisms through which trade for environmental services currently occur are poorly organised and highly-inefficient. Such inefficiency stems from the package nature of supply and demand for environmental services, which has yet to be recognised by existing market designs. In this paper we propose and test, both in the real world and laboratory, a package market using the Balanced Winners’ Contribution rule of Lindsay (2018). Proprietary data from the real world shows that the package market design can facilitate trade where current approaches fail. The experimental results point to this new market design offering substantial efficiency gains relative to all approaches currently applied. This suggests that the real world result is likely to generalise, and is underpinned by the package market alleviating exposure risk and selecting for efficient trades.

One of Georgina Mace’s many transformational research contributions was to provide a universally applicable framework for incorporating any or all elements and connections of the natural environment within conventional economic decision making. We apply this natural capital framework to consider the overall effects of a suite of land-use policy options intended to promote the conservation and renewal of biodiversity. Options considered include sharing, sparing, three-compartment sparing, rewilding and organic farming regimes. Each are assessed in terms of their impact on both domestic and global biodiversity. Reinforced by an empirical application considering land use in Great Britain, we show that while policy has prioritised sharing options, evidence supports land sparing and three-compartment approaches as more efficient, sustainable and equitable alternatives.

Sustainability requires we restore biodiversity and wider ecosystem services, yet developments such as new housing inevitably cause environmental impacts. Accordingly developers are increasingly required to resource offset projects, delivering biodiversity or wider environmental net gains. However, analysis of offsets in England show the large majority are conducted within development sites rather than being targeted towards better opportunities for net gains elsewhere. Here we compare current and alternative approaches to offsetting considering the biodiversity gains, ecosystem service co-benefits and economic costs they generate. Results confirm that current practice performs relatively poorly across all criteria. Analysis shows that by incorporating ecological and economic information into the targeting of offsets they can provide a significant contribution to addressing the challenge of biodiversity loss or deliver substantial ecosystem service co-benefits to disadvantaged communities. The analytical methods and results presented here could support a substantial improvement in the operation and outcomes of biodiversity offsetting globally.