Resilient Provision of Ecosystem Services from Agricultural Landscapes: Trade-offs Involving Means and Variances of Water Quality Improvements

Sergey S. Rabotyagov, Adriana M. Valcu-Lisman and Catherine Kling

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2016, vol. 98, issue 5, 1295-1313

Abstract: We assess the trade-offs and synergies involved in reducing agriculture-generated nutrient loads with different levels of resilience. We optimize the selection of least-cost patterns of agricultural conservation practices for both the expected performance of the conservation actions and its variance. Securing nutrient loads with a higher level of resilience is costly, with marginal costs of resilience generally declining with lower loads. We find that the main trade-off dimension is between cost of conservation investments and ecosystem service objectives, as opposed to pronounced mean-variance or between-nutrient objectives trade-offs. We find relative synergies in agricultural conservation investments aimed at nutrient reductions.

Keywords: Agricultural conservation practices; agricultural nonpoint-source pollution; ecosystem services trade-offs; multiobjective optimization; evolutionary algorithms; safety first; resilience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Working Paper: Resilient Provision of Ecosystem Services from Agricultural Landscapes: Tradeoffs Involving Means and Variances of Water Quality Improvements (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:98:y:2016:i:5:p:1295-1313.

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