Defining cost-effective ways to improve ecosystem services provision in agroecosystems

Mitigating climate change through the adoption of environmental-friendly agricultural practices also affects biodiversity and the provision of other non-marketed ecosystem services (hereafter, ES). In this paper, we investigate a method to identify cost-effective strategies to improve the provision of these ES. We model the link between agricultural practices and the provision of ES, to illustrate the general antagonism between agricultural production and the provision of non-marketed ES, as well as synergies among the latter. We run efficiency analyses on the simulated agroecological data to explore the interactions among ES and identify efficient bundles of ES. Improving the provision of non-marketed ES comes at a cost in terms of production. The bundle of ES provided by an alternative management option has an opportunity cost corresponding to the profit loss compared to the most profitable management option. We determine which strategy costs less to improve the provision of non-marketed ES: to adopt a given set of agroecological practices over the whole agricultural area, or to dedicate only a part of the landscape to the provision of the non-marketed ES. This result is helpful to determine if agroenvironmental policies should target large areas with uniform low requirements, or several smaller areas with higher environmental conditions. It can be used to determine cost-effective ways to mitigate climate change through agricultural practices reducing greenhouse gases emissions and increasing carbon storage in soil while maintaining other ES.