EVALUATION OF LAND SPARING AND LAND SHARING SCENARIOS FOR THE GREENING OF INTENSIVE APPLE CULTIVATION LANDSCAPES

The Green Revolution has allowed the value of total agricultural output keeping ahead of global population growth rates, at the cost however of environmental quality and biodiversity. The ‘land sharing’ vs. ‘land sparing’ concept provides a heuristic framework to answer the key-question how biodiversity conservation can be optimized while at the same time food production can be sustained, at the scale of entire landscapes. In the highly productive agricultural landscapes of NW Europe, this question realigns on the comparison of the costs and benefits of land sparing (i.e. setting aside nature reserves) vs. a wide range of different land sharing scenarios (i.e. wildlife friendly agriculture) which all are characterized by various degrees and types of agricultural extensification of formerly highly productive farm land. The general objectives of this research proposal, that is focused on apple producing landscapes in the Flanders region of Belgium, are to: (i) Use the land sharing vs. land sparing framework to quantify trade-offs between yield and farmer income on the one side, and biodiversity conservation and Ecosystem Service (ES) provisioning on the other side; (ii) Use these trade-off functions to parameterize a set of Agent Based Models which can predict the adoption of different land sharing scenarios and their biodiversity and ES provisioning consequences under different policy scenarios, aiming at agricultural extensification.The proposed project is multidisciplinary, involving ecologists and agricultural and resource economists.

Keywords:Land Sharing vs. Land Sparing, Biodiversity, Ecosystem services, Agent based model, Farm economic analysis

Disciplines:Ecology, Environmental science and management, Other environmental sciences, Geology, Aquatic sciences, challenges and pollution, Animal biology, Veterinary medicine, Fisheries sciences