Synthesizing evidence in the economics of farm environmental biodiversity

现代农业对确保粮食安全至关重要，但集约化耕作造成的景观变化使生态系统承受压力。自然景观提供了许多重要的服务：树木和灌木丛可以通过减少暴雨后的地表径流来减轻洪水。它们为昆虫提供了栖息地，为我们的果园和花园授粉，也为支持繁荣的河流生态系统的动物提供了栖息地。需要制定有效的农业环境政策，以确保实现在维持景观生物多样性和生态系统服务的同时维持生产性农业这一有时相互对立但至关重要的目标。英国退欧后计划中的英国农业政策改革应该支持这些目标，同时努力应对离开单一市场对该部门的后果和日益严重的气候变化威胁。该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计划。它通过关注农民对支持其影响最大的生态系统服务的承诺来实现这一目标。我们使用数据驱动的工具来估计自然景观的多功能价值，并设计支持生物多样性和洪水管理的合同。通过提供鼓励和奖励农民与邻居合作的计划，从相对较小的个人承诺中最大限度地增加栖息地收益，我们提出了限制该部门成本的方法，并确保未来公共支出的最大回报。

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.