Ecologically Intermediate and Economically Final: The Role of the Ecosystem Services Framework in Measuring Sustainability in Agri-Food Systems

Abstract

Ecosystem services can be defined as the ecosystem’s contribution to human activities. According to recent assessments, the agricultural sector is one of the most important economic users of ecosystem services in Europe. To assess, value, and account for ecosystem services related to the agri-food system offers the possibility to measure and investigate how agricultural management practices together with changing environmental conditions can affect ecological resilience. However, the accounting of ecosystem services’ flows needs to be carefully addressed, because the overlapping of services and benefits and the overlapping of what are considered intermediate and final services could create dangerous misunderstandings about the role and importance of ecosystem services in agriculture. This paper reports on the possible accounting approaches that can be used to assess crop provision, as well as their meanings and implications from an ecological to an economic perspective. The results demonstrate that an economic accounting-based assessment of ecosystem services needs to move from an ecological holistic view to a one-by-one disaggregation of ecosystem services in order to avoid underestimates that would ultimately affect the policy perception of the role of ecosystems with respect to the agri-food systems’ resilience.

Interpreting Different Narratives about Land Services and Land Use Economics of Common Agricultural Policy

“…Another crucial aspect is that the Strategic Plans intend to support small-scale farming by implementing measures such as capping funds for large farmers, introducing redistributive payments, defining which farmers are eligible for support, and providing equipment allowances for young farmers. In researching food security criteria through the CAP Strategic Plans, one needs to be careful to avoid accounting for land services as "benefits" that have already been incorporated into the food provisioning service [27].…”

Groundwater Ecosystem Services: Redefining and Operationalizing the Concept

“…In the analysis of groundwater ecosystem services, a crucial step involved classifying these services into the two key categories, i.e., intermediate and final, with the aim to avoid, or at least reduce, double counting in ecosystem services' valuation via stated (e.g., contingent valuation and choice experiments) and revealed preference (e.g., travel cost, hedonic pricing, and production function) approaches [41][42][43][44]. Although this problem is widely recognized, particularly among economists, it has not been adequately addressed as a significant factor contributing to the inaccuracy and unreliability of ecosystem services' valuation [16,41,44].…”