Carbon farming in its various forms has the potential to deliver a range of ecosystem services in addition to climate regulation. In Australia, the main public 'co-benefits' that could result from carbon farming are conservation of biodiversity, increases in soil and water quality, and economic and cultural services for Indigenous communities. While there is a lack of empirical evidence that carbon farming is delivering these ecosystem services to date, various metrics have been developed by researchers and through other payment for ecosystem services schemes that may enable effective targeting of these co-benefits. In this article, we review previous studies and schemes and identify four main approaches for metrics that could be applied to carbon farming in Australia: (1) spatial modelling, (2) benchmarks; (3) environmental benefit indices; and (4) indicators. The relative value of each of these approaches varies, depending on the objectives of policy-makers. Spatial modelling and benchmarks can play a key role in decision support systems for landholders who may be interested in carbon farming. Indices are valuable for the development of new or modified market-based schemes that weigh up different co-benefits. Indicators are critical for outcomebased payment schemes and for verifying the effectiveness of co-benefit policies overall.
ABSTRACT. In recent years, the ecosystem services (ES) concept has become a major paradigm for natural resource management. While policy-makers demand "hard" monetary evidence that nature conservation would be worth investing in, ongoing attempts are being made to formalize the concept as a scientifically robust "one size fits all" analytical framework. These attempts have highlighted several major limitations of the ES concept. First, to date, the concept has paid little attention to the role of humans in the production of ES. Second, the ongoing formalization of the ES concept is turning it into a "technology of globalization," thereby increasingly ignoring the socio-cultural context and history within which ecosystems emerge. Third, economic valuation has been shown to limit local stakeholders in expressing their daily and immediate ways of interacting with their environment over and beyond extrinsic motivation provided by financial gains. We address these three limitations by analyzing a social evaluation of the roles of peri-urban farmland from a territorial perspective. Our case study is the Thau lagoon in southern France. We conducted in-depth interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and ran two participatory workshops. Using a territorial meta-model that distinguishes three levelsphysical, logical, and existential-stakeholder data were analyzed to unravel the interplay of territorial elements at these three levels that gives rise to ES in two broad categories: food production and aesthetic landscape. The coupling of ES and territory concepts opens up several novel analytical perspectives. It allows partitioning of ES in a manner that "re-contextualizes" them and gives insight about both their physical constituents and their meaning at the territorial level. Additional research should incorporate the dynamics of service demand and supply, and further investigate options for implementation.
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