Allocating land for an ecosystem service: a simple model of nutrient retention with an application to the Chesapeake Bay watershed. (Special Issue: 2011 Special Issue on Wetlands Management, Economics and Policy.)

摘要

There has been great interest in recent decades in "ecosystem services." One of the services most often mentioned is the retention of nutrients. I construct a simple model of agricultural land use under a regulatory requirement that nutrient loading cannot exceed a fixed ceiling. Farmers decide the quantity of residual nutrients they will generate, how much land they will allocate to production, and, consequently, how much land that could have been used for production they will instead preserve for the retention of nutrients. I develop three propositions. First, when the regulatory constraint is relatively weak, there will be a corner solution in which no land is set aside to provide the service of nutrient retention. Second, for any given regulatory constraint, there is a maximum amount of land that would be set aside to provide ecosystem services, regardless of the efficiency with which preserved land performs the nutrient retention function. Third, when it would prove very valuable to set some land aside for nutrient retention, less land in total may optimally be preserved for this purpose than when the service is less valuable. I illustrate the implications of this model with an application to the Chesapeake Bay watershed.Digital Object Identifier http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-7976.2010.01214.x