An Integrated Economic, Environmental and Social Approach to Agricultural Land-Use Planning

Abstract

Agricultural land-use change is a dynamic process that varies as a function of social, economic and environmental factors spanning from the local to the global scale. The cumulative regional impacts of these factors on land use adoption decisions by farmers are neither well accounted for nor reflected in agricultural land use planning. We present an innovative spatially explicit agent-based modelling approach (Crop GIS-ABM) that accounts for factors involved in farmer decision making on new irrigation adoption to enable land-use predictions and exploration. The model was designed using a participatory approach, capturing stakeholder insights in a conceptual model of farmer decisions. We demonstrate a case study of the factors influencing the uptake of new irrigation infrastructure and land use in Tasmania, Australia. The model demonstrates how irrigated land-use expansion promotes the diffusion of alternative crops in the region, as well as how coupled social, biophysical and environmental conditions play an important role in crop selection. Our study shows that agricultural land use reflected the evolution of multiple simultaneous interacting biophysical and socio-economic drivers, including soil and climate type, crop and commodity prices, and the accumulated effects of interactive decisions of farmers.

Whole farm planning raises profit despite burgeoning climate crisis

“…Fit-for-purpose decision support systems and advanced digital analytics account for and allow comparisons between climatic, agronomic, financial, social and cultural factors in a simultaneous manner 4,9,28 . Digital tools can help users improve the allocation of available resources (sunlight, water, existing soil nutrients) and inputs (e.g.…”

Sustainable intensification with irrigation raises farm profit despite climate emergency

“…This result was attributed to higher proportion of farm area under irrigation and higher rates of irrigation, higher N usage and a more intense cropping system rotation that included high yielding maize and rice (Figures 3-5). This suggests that whole-farm intensifi- numerous farms applied Intensification at the regional scale, it is possible that nitrogen leaching into ground water and regional irrigation requirements would increase, suggesting a need for more regional studies that take into account interactions between farms at the landscape scale (e.g., Shahpari et al, 2021).…”

Coupling optimization with territorial LCA to support agricultural land-use planning

“…Further study could be conducted to account for farmers' decisions in the model by using agent-based modeling (ABM), which allows the simulation of a set of agents interacting and system dynamicity (Miller et al, 2013;Baustert and Benetto, 2017). Besides, the participatory approach is also feasible to enhance the applicability of the current work by capturing stakeholders' insights (including farmers) in land-use planning, improving stakeholders' understanding of the system, and clarifying the impacts of changes to help the decision-making (Shahpari, 2019;Shahpari et al, 2021;Chopin et al, 2019). By accounting for multiple stakeholders' preferences and simulating their decisions, researchers could explore alternative policy interventions and associated simulated results to propose the ones that align with the optimal solutions at the territorial level (Brunner et al, 2016;Bartkowski et al, 2020).…”