Linking Changes in Soil Natural Capital to the Performance of Ecosystem Services Delivery to Inform Investment for Resource Management.

In order to be able to capture the real impacts of land degradation, land use changes or management practices on soil natural capital and repercussions on land use sustainability and environmental outcomes, any evaluation needs to include the assessment of the whole range of ecosystem services provided by landscapes. Until then the information available to policy makers for decision making remains utterly incomplete.

This paper explores how using economic valuation of ecosystem services when added to cost-benefit analysis can inform the suitability and sustainability of different types of investments, through two on-farm examples.

The first case study evaluates soil conservation practices in hill country for sheep and beef grazed pastures in the Hawke’s Bay region in New Zealand, to show the impacts of an investment in ecological infrastructure on the farming system and ecosystem services delivery.

The second case study examines the impacts of an investment in build infrastructure, namely the addition of irrigation to a part of a 250ha dairy farm in the Manawatu sand country in New Zealand.

An ecosystem services approach to the costs and benefits of such investments makes transparent additional long-term benefits to the sustainability of farming systems, which are not currently captured in neo-classical assessments.

Finally, the use of an ecosystem’s approach to resource management is discussed regarding the links between land evaluation, ecosystem services delivery and society’s desired outcomes, and how it can be integrated and used on the ground to advance existing governance frameworks and to solve resource management challenges.