Modelling the supply of ecosystem services from agriculture: a minimum-data approach *

John M. Antle and Roberto O. Valdivia

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2006, vol. 50, issue 1, pages 1-15

Abstract: We argue that to support agriculture-environmental policy decision making, stakeholders need 'quantitative back-of-the-envelope' analysis that is timely and sufficiently accurate to make informed decisions. We apply this concept to the analysis of the supply of ecosystem services from agriculture. We present a spatially explicit production model and show how it can be used to derive the supply of ecosystem services in a region. This model shows that the supply of ecosystem services can be derived from the spatial distribution of opportunity cost of providing those services. We then show how this conceptual model can be used to develop a minimum-data (MD) approach to the analysis of the supply of ecosystem services from agriculture that can be implemented with the kinds of secondary data that are available in most parts of the world. We apply the MD approach to simulate the supply of carbon that could be sequestered in agricultural soils in the dryland grain-producing region of Montana. We find that the supply curve derived from the MD approach can approximate the supply curve obtained from a more elaborate model based on site-specific data, and can do so with sufficient accuracy for policy analysis. Copyright Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell ... &year=2006&part=null link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1364-985X

Access Statistics for this article

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics is edited by Tom Kompas, Jeff Bennett and Quentin Grafton

More articles in Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().