Synthesizing evidence in the economics of farm environmental biodiversity

现代农业对确保粮食安全至关重要，但集约化农业造成的景观变化给生态系统带来了压力。自然景观提供了许多重要的服务：树木和灌木可以通过减少暴雨后的地表径流来缓解洪水。它们为为我们的果园和花园授粉的昆虫提供栖息地，也为维持河流生态系统繁荣的动物提供栖息地。需要有效的农业环境政策，以确保在维持景观生物多样性和生态系统服务的同时实现维持生产性农业这一有时相互矛盾但至关重要的目标。英国脱欧后计划进行的农业政策改革应支持这些目标，同时应对退出单一市场对该行业的影响，以及日益严重的气候变化威胁。本研究项目的重点是考虑生物多样性价值和设计具有成本效益的空间目标农业环境方案。它通过关注农民对生态系统服务的支持承诺来实现这一目标。我们使用数据驱动的工具来评估自然景观的多功能价值，以及支持生物多样性和洪水管理的设计合同。通过提供方案，鼓励和奖励农民与邻居合作，从相对较小的个人承诺中获得最大的栖息地收益，我们提出了限制该部门成本并确保未来公共支出获得最大回报的方法。

Modern agriculture is vital to ensuring food security, but changes to the landscape due to intensive farming put ecosystems under stress. Natural landscapes provide many vital services: Wood- and shrubland can mitigate flooding by reducing surface runoff following heavy rains. They provide habitats for insects that pollinate our orchards and gardens, and animals that support thriving river ecosystems. Effective agri-environmental policies are needed to ensure the sometimes opposing but crucially important goals of sustaining productive agriculture while maintaining landscape biodiversity and ecosystem services are met. The planned reform of UK agricultural policies following Brexit should support these goals while wrestling with the consequences for the sector from leaving the single market and the growing threat of climate change. This research project focuses on factoring biodiversity values and designing cost-effective spatially targeted agri-environmental schemes. It achieves this by focusing on farmers' commitment to supporting ecosystem services where they have the most significant impact. We use data-driven tools to estimate the multifunctional value of natural landscapes and design contracts that support both biodiversity and flood management. By providing schemes that encourage and reward farmers for collaborating with their neighbours to maximize habitat gains from relatively small individual commitments, we propose ways to limit the costs to the sector and ensure the greatest return on future public spending.